What stands out in these book recommendations (such as the one above from Council on Foreign Affairs) is how consistently books written by women scholars about Iran are rarely mentioned. When mentioned, they are often books about women or literature or memoirs. (See for example this list.) The Financial Times wins the award for pretty much recommending the same set of books in June 2025 to understand the “Israel-Iran conflict” and January 2026 to “understand the unrest.”

(Out of curiosity, I asked AI to give me 10 books written by women scholars on Iran that are not about women. Here is what it said: “That search went down a male-author dead end. Let me try more targeted searches for specific subfields and known female names in Iranian political studies.” Despite the abundance of available titles, AI still had a hard time and gave me 10 books written by 3 women only one of whom is a scholar.)

To wit, below is my recommendation of books for better understanding Iran or something like that. I purposefully focused on scholarship because you can’t understand Iran without the help of those who know the language, the landscape, the sources, the history and have spent sometimes years puzzling over questions and answers. The list includes books by men and women but I have highlighted books by women writing about topics other than women. (Shockingly we exist!)

I focused on scholarship also because I’m personally tired of the oft-repeated sentiment that scholars write either inaccessible books or irrelevant ones. Yes, some scholarship is inaccessible and some are about topics that do not seem relevant to our in-flames world. Just as some policy writing and journalism are plain wrong but that doesn’t stop their authors from being continuously quoted, going on television, and even informing foreign policy with serious implications.

Is erroneous yet accessible knowledge better or worse than deeply researched inaccessible ones? Who am I to pass judgement on such a conundrum?!

What I will say is that if the ultimate goal is to “better understand Iran” then it behooves us to slow down a little and not be scared of complexity in writing and in thought. It is absolutely ok not to understand everything written on a page and it is absolutely ok to not speed read as social media has accustomed all of us to do, and it is absolutely ok to skip parts of something we don’t understand (or like even) and go to the parts that we do. That’s the beauty of reading.

Of the titles below, some I love, some I like, some I have real problems with but that’s no reason not to seek them out. Will these books help you better understand Iran? I hope so. Let’s read them and find out.

Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern In Iran (2004)

Fariba’s book is one of the few in-depth studies we have of 1990s Iran, a crucial period for understanding the transformations the country went through in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war and how the reform era was born. Since the war, the journalistic and policy consensus is that the current people in power are a “new generation.” I’m skeptical. Perhaps the 2026 war has given birth to a new politics much like the 1980s war did. The book through a wide set of topics, gives us a deep view into how.

Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, Kaveh Ehsani eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (2018)

I’m kind of going to cheat here and kind of not and recommend this edited volume that provides a vast and comparative perspective of oil workers and labor relations in the global oil industries. There are only a few essays on Iran in particular but honestly, how can you understand oil and labor if not in a global perspective?

To focus on Iran, more recent scholarship has turned towards histories of oil as infrastructure. I like how these 2 books below stop at the CIA led coup in 1953 and in doing so provide a much needed historical understanding of how we even got there.

Matin Biglari, Nationalising Oil and Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933-51 (2025) & Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (2018)

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800-1988 (2023)

There is no dearth of books and writings about US-Iranian relationships. Firoozeh’s book is a detailed historical look at the two countries’ encounters beginning in 1830. Good historians know how to de-essentialize our firmly held beliefs that things were always the way we think they are now.

Arang Keshavarzian, Making Space For the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (2024)

Arang’s book “reveals how for over a century capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have conditioned and been shaped by different understandings of the Persian Gulf as a region.” It is a thoughtful and beautifully written book that asks us to think regionally as opposed to the current US/Israel/Iran triad. The peace deal that few have seen but everyone has an opinion on is arguably born from much of the history laid out in this book. This is the perfect time to read it.

Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi eds. Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021)

This edited volume of 12 articles, delves into the 1979 revolution from the local to the transnational and global. There are many topics covered and you can pick and you choose which you want to delve into. But put together, the essays in this volume “conceive of the Iranian Revolution not as exceptional or anachronistic, but as an uprising constituted by multiple, interwoven geographies and histories.”

Norma Claire Moruzzi, Tied Up in Tehran: Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran (2025)

Yes, a book by a woman on women but also no. Norma’s book is a delightfully observed romp through 1990s and early 2000s Iran that begins with a bizarre story of a home invasion in Tehran. It covers topics like food, shoe shopping, cinema, jokes, and sex to draw a detailed picture of politics rooted in the everyday life.

Golnar Nikpour, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (2024)

Golnar’s book covers almost 100 years of Iranian history told through the prism of the development of prisons. She reminds us that while political prisoners take up most of our mental space, Iran’s carceral system—past and present—includes a wider range of crimes and punishments that are crucial to its evolution.

Arzoo Osanloo, Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran (2020)

Arzoo’s book focuses on “Iran’s criminal justice system, which affords individuals the right of retribution, but also allows and even encourages them to forgo it.” I have been returning to this book in the past months as Iran has stepped up its execution of protestors to better understand the complex legal system.

Zhand Shakibi, Nostalgia in Late Pahlavi Iran (2025)

Nostalgia is a hot topic in discussions of Iran today. To what degree are Iranians in the grip of nostalgia for the Pahlavi monarchy and does that explain the support for the US/Israel war on Iran by both people inside Iran and the diaspora? This book doesn’t directly address that but it’s the only book I know on Iran that places nostalgia at the heart of its historical analysis of Iran. It focuses on “the forms, expressions, and narratives of nostalgia found in the societal popular and state spheres” and in doing so it shows how the Pahlavi state itself was using nostalgia as an instrument for furthering its broad social and political agenda in 1970s Iran.

Rose Wellman, Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic (2021)

Rose’s book is an ethnographic study of Basij families. The basiji is one of the most contentious figures in the Iranian political landscape both inside and outside the country. In its focus on the everyday and the home but in basijis families whose “everyday piety are linked to state power,” it is a useful complement to Norma’s Tied Up in Tehran.

There’s a lot I have left out in terms of topics (environmental studies, ethnic and religious minorities, urbanism, music, etc) and people. My apologies to my wonderful colleagues whose books should have been but are not mentioned. Don’t read into it anything other than the limits of time and space. Feel free to leave other recommendations in the comments or better yet, take over this space and create your own lists that show the diversity of knowledge that can help all of us gain a better understanding of Iran locally, regionally, and globally.

p.s. A very valid critique of scholarship is the price of books. Some of the books mentioned here are prohibitively expensive. The reasons have everything to do with the politics of higher education in North America, which I won’t get into. But don’t let that stop you. You can get a lot of these books through libraries, and some have cheaper (or even free access) electronic versions or are available through used booksellers. Worse case scenario, almost everyone on this list has given book talks that are available on the web if you search for them.

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This is increasingly not a philosophical question for people in Iran but one as vital (or even more vital) than “daily bread,” argues Dr. Maryam Nasr-Esfahani, a feminist philosopher and ethicist, and a member of the faculty at the Research Center for Human Sciences and Cultural Studies in Tehran.1

While Iran in the Western press is once again shunted into a limited set of topics such as geopolitics, conflict, and regime survivability with a smattering of economic desperation thrown in for good measure, Dr. Nasr-Esfahani begins her talk (given in the fantastically named “The Weight of the World” bookstore) in Tehran with the following words:

“This talk is not about war and peace in a military context. It makes no claims about that. Besides, we fundamentally have no agency in that story.”

What follows though is not a portrait of darkness but a reflection on polarization, reconciliation, and possibilities of a democratic life. Her central metaphor, and the title of her speech, confronts the “Big Brother” of power, surveillance, and ideological conformity with the “Little Sister,” i.e. those who quietly preserve social peace through everyday acts of dignity, empathy, and solidarity.

Although rooted in contemporary Iran, this essay speaks far beyond it as it reflects on how societies fracture and how they heal through our ability to recognize the humanity of those with whom we profoundly disagree.

I am grateful to Dr. Nasr-Esfahani for providing me with the text of her speech, which has not been published elsewhere, and giving me permission to post it here.2 This translation is produced as part of an effort to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives and analyses published inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

This is an abridged text of Dr. Maryam Nasr-Esfahani’s speech given on May 26, 2026 at Vazn-e Donya [the weight of the world] bookstore in Tehran, organized by Siyasatnameh magazine and Saray-e Ulum Ensani [House of Humanities]. To read the entire text in Persian click here.

“The Little Sister Facing the Big Brother” by Maryam Nasr-Esfahani3

This talk is not about war and peace in a military context. It makes no claims about that. Besides, we fundamentally have no agency in that story.

In scholarship on “practical wisdom,”4 Muslim philosophers place collective acts of worship under the topic of “kindness” [محبت] in society. Today, which happens to be the Day of Arafah [the apex of the Hajj], these kinds of gatherings for dialogue and mutual understanding about the complex post-war conditions in [Iranian] society can serve that very function of creating kindness, which is a necessity today.

Why did I start with kindness versus hatred [نفرت]? Allow me to bring a few quotes from official and unofficial media that point to the hatred-filled state of current relations.

A hardline presenter on Channel Two of Iranian state television, reacting to a comparison of internet conditions in Iran with the testing of 5G internet in Afghanistan and the start of international credit cards in Syria, said: “If these things matter so much, go and live there. Go buy wide tape from Amazon in Syria with a credit card and tape your windows for when the bombing starts.”

A well-known reformist figures, referring to intellectuals who had spoken about the horrific economic conditions ahead, said that if they do not have the courage to defend the Islamic Republic they should “shut up.”

On the other side, a university professor outside Iran, referring to the nightly street gatherings in condemnation of the war, which had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere in which wedding ceremonies were also taking place, wrote on his Facebook page:

“Like stray dogs and cats mating in a corner of the street, with a dowry of one copy of the Holy Quran and one Shahed drone. They’ve even named it ‘Union with the Guardianship.’ A decent person gets married in a registry office, not by the side of the road under a streetlamp.”

Or this, from a well-known analytical news website:

“Imagine not knowing which house around you contains a zombie that alien beings want to eliminate at any cost. Now you’re worried that maybe the neighbor next door is also a zombie and we’re going to be killed because of them. And then these activated zombies also roam the streets every night... this is no longer a fictional horror story; it is the reality of our lives today.”

And these are just cases from media. A sharper language circulates among the people: in the metro, taxis and bus stops, in neighborhoods, shops, and even since last Dey [December/January referencing the protests and the brutal crackdown], within families. The polarization of society has seeped into the home.

We have fallen into a kind of invisible, banal sectarianism [فرقه‌گرایی نامری یا روزمره]. During the painful events of Dey, we saw that this everyday sectarianism can easily be exploited and transformed into hard and violent sectarianism. Orders come from outside the country to take to the streets and seize military centers, and a group of people who feel like second-class citizens take to the streets and what happened, happened…

The reconciliation I want to talk about concerns the relationships full of anger and hatred that exist within society. To quote Javadi-Yeganeh [a sociologist at the University of Tehran]: based on national surveys, society has split into two groups, neither numerically larger than the other. But each considers itself to be in the right and considers the other to be mercenaries. Reconciliation in this society is more essential than daily bread.

We expect the initiative for reconciliation to come from the authorities. But what is their understanding of it?

A philosophy professor on X: “As a philosophy teacher I address those on the side of the revolutionary discourse: let us open our arms to those who have stepped off the train of the revolution. With kindness, let us open our arms for the return of the ‘Mahsas.’” [Mahsas here refers to the participants and the supporters of the Women, Life, Freedom movement or the Mahsa movement named after Mahsa Amini.]

Then a sociology professor responded: “Why don’t we ask the ‘Mahsas’: what have you sacrificed for Iran? Why don’t you open your arms to the bereaved mothers of martyred veterans? Why don’t you sit at the Zahra lamentation gatherings? They [the martyrs] gave everything for Iran; why don’t you set aside your pride and admit your mistakes toward these authentic and historically great forces?”

I am shocked. Do they know who Mahsa was? Mahsa and the Mahsas who are no longer alive.

This is our rulers’ understanding of reconciliation. Disagreement in our society still has no legitimacy and is called “sedition.” The statesmen’s understanding of “consensus” [وفاق] — the slogan with which they won the majority vote5 — is apparently of the same nature. Reconciliation to them means: let us get on board too. It means continuation of the status quo without grumbling, and acceptance of things as they are.

In this view, the authorities are the older brother of the family, the wisest of all, who must take care of everyone, and to whose judgment the rest must submit. Orwell’s Big Brother governs through intense surveillance and control: personal relationships, food, clothing and, crucially, language, in order to eliminate critical thinking. Today, with digital spaces and the media waves directed at Iran from outside the country, we understand this better. Big Brother predicts and directs behavior through data. Under the name of “benevolence and security,” he destroys the most basic principles of individual freedom.

This view sees society as a body with a commanding head and obedient limbs. It does not tolerate disagreement, diagnosing it as deviation and sickness that must be treated, or, when incurable, amputated. Farabi regards his ideal city as a healthy body led by the philosopher-head, and uses the expression “uprooting weeds” for dealing with incorrigible disorder. In this view, we are defined in opposition to the other, even if we live in the same country, and even if we consider our own neighbor a “zombie.”

Modernity offered a different vision: society not as a single body with one brain, but as a body politic, a constructed community of individuals who, based on a social contract, have decided to live together. We have still not reached this consensus.

John Paul Lederach introduces two fundamental dimensions for lasting peace: vertical peace and horizontal peace.6 Vertical peace concerns power relations between state and people, elites and masses. Horizontal peace concerns relations between people themselves: neighbor with neighbor, colleague with colleague, brother with sister. Lederach emphasizes that without horizontal peace, vertical peace cannot last. Even the best political agreements collapse if human relations are not repaired.

In our society, after a grinding war with two military phases and one domestic phase, Big Brother is finally thinking about making peace among the big brothers. He wants all the limbs to speak with one voice.

But the Little Sister in her child’s school, in the street, the apartment, and the workplace, confronts a different, hatred-filled reality every day. She sees the family quarrels, the ostracism of the veiled student in her classroom, the lying and hypocrisy of colleagues who submit to anything to survive, and the ideological litmus tests that push those who think differently to the edge of dismissal.

We Little Sisters, at the lowest parts of the pyramid, are worried. The apex is caught up in a fierce war that in two rounds took thousands of innocent lives and by encouraging urban warfare destroyed thousands of young lives in Iran. Meanwhile, the volatile social and economic conditions keep us in a state of constant alarm.

What should we do? Keep quiet? Should we just watch how humiliation causes hatred and hatred creates violence? Covert sectarianism has become so powerful that any expression of opinion brings a flood of insults. Going along with one faction, or saying nothing, might be easier.

But I think the choice for many of us is not comfort. That is why we have gathered here. I want to invite us to talk about the effort of the Little Sister, the effort toward horizontal reconciliation, which is difficult, long, full of labels, and without any medal or honor.

Theoretically I draw on Roger Mac Ginty, specialist in “everyday peace.”7 But practically, the experience of the women’s movement in Iran from the Constitutional Revolution to the present day offers a good model for thinking about everyday reconciliation.

What power does everyday peace have when Big Brother is not on its side?

A few days ago, my husband and I saw a serious accident on the highway in which one of the parties was a woman without a headscarf. I said: what if the police don’t help her because of her hijab? He laughed: “Don’t worry. This police officer’s own wife and family probably wear hijab the same way.” That is where the power of everyday peace lies.

Everyday peace includes the actions, ways of thinking, and strategies that ordinary people in polarized societies employ to coexist. Mac Ginty focuses not on diplomacy but on individual behaviors, friendship networks, and shared environments: the bus, the bakery, the apartment stairwell. He introduces three strategies:

Strategic civility — this is not mere courtesy; it is a great “no” to the logic of Big Brother. The little sister says to the opposing other: “However much the structures of power try to make you appear as a ‘traitor’ or a ‘zombie,’ I recognize you as a human being with rights and dignity.” Strategic civility is the brake that prevents society from falling into naked violence. It is embodied by the one who, despite political difference, is not afraid of having her patriotism confiscated, and writes about the suffering of the children of Minab just as she wrote about those killed in Dey. Sometimes it is as small as a smile in response to a gaze full of hatred. Sometimes it is the presence of unveiled women at the nightly gatherings — an act of bridge-building that costs nothing and means everything.

Resistance through normalization — disrupting structures that want to keep us in permanent crisis. Big Brother needs a “permanent state of exception” to justify his surveillance. The power structure wants to make everything political — your clothing, your shopping, the music in your earphones. The little sister’s response is the deliberate depoliticization of spaces. This resistance insists on everyday life even when they want to force her to shut down her online shop because it is wartime, or mock her for buying a VPN configuration to post pictures of herself going to cafes. The little sister wears colorful clothes and seeks out ways to gather cheaply and with empathy: novel reading circles, film watching, any collective idea. This peace does not issue manifestos or organize large gatherings. It passes under Big Brother’s surveillance radars precisely because it is quiet. It creates the image of living with the “other” in a secure future; what Lederach calls “moral imagination.” The little sister practices it by breaking the isolation of the veiled girl in her class, by befriending a colleague who does not think like her, by talking with the opposing neighbor about the building’s garden.

Micro-circuits of solidarity — the effort to stitch together the torn body. Big Brother blocks large circuits of solidarity such as parties, NGOs, independent gatherings so that society cannot organize voluntarily. The little sister responds by building micro-circuits woven into the fabric of neighborhoods and everyday relations: networks for helping people who have been harmed, regardless of their beliefs. When the power structure draws the blade of polarization and tears the fabric of society, the little sister on the ground, with threads and needles of micro-solidarity, stitches the wounds. These circuits are so small and human that no software can classify them as a threat but they are the greatest antidote against social collapse.

Horizontal peace needs a 20 to 50-year horizon. Big Brother resolves crises with deadlines and suppression. The little sister, with everyday patience, weaves the ground of the future. Mac Ginty attacks top-down engineered peace as opportunistic, mechanical, and unsustainable; it smells not of peace but of domination.

The little sister’s insistence on keeping life normal is not indifference or carelessness. It is deep philosophical resistance. When she still wears colorful clothes despite the heavy shadows of crisis, walks in parks with friends of different types, finds cheap entertainment, keeps everyday humor alive, she is making peace. The one who buys an expensive VPN configuration and writes about her daily routines, or sells her handmade goods, is promoting life.

Big Brother sees society as a single body with one brain, and every dissenting voice as a threat. The little sister sees society as a contractual body where different individuals who, despite their differences, have agreed to build a common peaceful destiny. In this body, difference is not deviation but the natural reality of collective life. Reconciliation is not submission but conscious cooperation for the collective good.

This cooperation is not commanded and has no intention of making everyone the same. It comes from within everyday conversations, from friendships with different people, from small acts of forgiveness. No one should be eliminated because they are different. We must be able to live together.

Everyday peace is the last tree we can make a vow at to preserve the life and beauty of society, and yet it can also be the first tree that multiplies peace and contributes to the consolidation of lasting peace.

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In the past week to 10 days, I wrote and did not publish a number of posts, including one about the ongoing executions in Iran centered on what is known in Persian as “the kids of Ekbatan,” 4 young men accused of killing a seminary student in the fall of 2022 during the Mahsa protests. Nor did I publish about the waves of war narratives (both in writing and in visual art form) coming out of Iran once the 88 day internet blackout ended several days ago. Not even about the simple jubilation of a whole country being able to once again communicate with the outside world, including parents with their children, siblings scattered around the world, aunts, uncles, niblings, and friends once again reunited by voice and image.

I wrote and did not publish because I too fell for something I shouldn’t have fallen for: The constant Chicken Little “the sky is fallling” call of the Iran analysis chattering classes. Every time I was about to publish something about longer term processes and forces underlying Iranian society and political system, a headline on the variation of: Iran deal near! MOU will come tomorrow! Iran and the US on the verge of war again! The Strait is doubled closed! The Strait is almost open! etc. popped on my screen and I thought to myself wait. That is more important than this.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to many of these analysts who worryingly seem to not get any rest: Everywhere you turn, they are on the radio, television, substack, youtube, newspaper, social media. Often the same handful of people who day in and day out go on camera or behind a mic or type onto screens their reading of tea leaves (mainly the US president’s posts on social media) as if it's some kind of gospel or window into the future. I do not put the blame on them. They’re just doing a job, a calling, perhaps even a necessary service. But it’s my responsibility, as I hope you see it as yours, to drown out the noise.

What is gospel for me is the need to break the cycle of short term analysis and understanding of Iran in “the public.” We need to stop forgoing deeper understandings of Iran in order to chase the news. And we need to continuously build a longer term view of Iranian society and politics that emanates from socio-cultural-political-economic dynamics from within the country even when the media’s attention is focused elsewhere, and even when everywhere around us someone is saying “Hey! Look at me! I can tell you the sky is falling” today and the opposite tomorrow, and feed whatever momentary anxiety or relief we want to feel.

Onwards!

Only days after the ceasefire on April 8, 2026, my colleague Hadi Kahalzadeh wrote:

“War has damaged more than 125,000 residential and civil buildings, including 339 health facilities, 32 universities, and 857 schools, and has directly destroyed over 20,000 industrial units, forcing many related businesses to shut down. In other words, around 20 percent of the country’s production units have been directly damaged.” In the same piece he estimated that “about 10 to 12 million jobs, roughly 50 percent of Iran’s workforce, are now at risk.”1

Today’s translation is a “field report” published in Shargh newspaper detailing the crushing effect of post-war inflation, the rise of the cost of basic food items, and widespread unemployment in all sectors of society. This report is one of many published in various newspapers on the ongoing post-war hardships in Iranian society, which also includes people delaying life-saving health visits or the purchasing of medications for lack of money.2

This translation is produced as part of an effort to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives and analyses published inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

Tehran: A City of Empty Pockets by Reyhane Joulaei published on May 30, 2026 [9th of Khordad, 1405]

In the bustle of Tehran’s crowded sidewalks, somewhere amid the unavoidable rush of well-dressed people with leather office bags, a silent crisis is unfolding that can no longer be hidden behind faces reddened by a slap. The middle class, that same educated, employed, engineer and technocrat stratum that was once the driving engine of the country’s economy, culture and stability, is these days in the process of gradual collapse under the merciless gears of rising inflation and widespread waves of layoffs. The shopping basket of this class, which was once a symbol of relative prosperity, has now been reduced to basic, survival-oriented items, and worse than that, an old but forgotten phenomenon called “hesab-e daftari va nesiyeh” [an informal “buy now pay later” system based often on the relationship of trust between customers and shopkeepers in a neighborhood. In the translation, I use “credit ledgers”] has returned in a modern and a more painful form.

A salary that doesn’t last to the end of the month

To understand the situation of the middle class, there is no need to examine the complex statistical charts of the Central Bank; it is enough to sit and talk with couples who for years ran their lives with careful planning, but today find themselves in a complete dead end to make ends meet.

One of Sharq‘s sources in central Tehran offers a clear picture of this economic fall. He and his wife are both employed and educated and have lived under one roof for years. In a tone mixed with exhaustion and longing, he speaks of the past years when their method of managing their expenses worked: one person’s salary was entirely spent on rent and part of loan installments, and the other’s salary covered daily expenses, food and household comfort.

According to him, they lived this way for years, and although they had no meaningful savings, with a little frugality, proper prioritization and living within their means, they made their money last to the end of the month and did not taste the bitter experience of absolute poverty. Now, however, the equation has completely changed. Today, two full salaries are not enough to cover one month’s expenses for this two-person family. The reason is clear: on one hand, the price of all basic and non-basic goods is growing rapidly on a weekly and daily basis, and on the other, their income has remained fixed. This employee says: “Our workplaces in recent months have been hit by a widespread and merciless wave of layoffs. In the current insecure job environment, the fact that we have managed to keep our jobs and not join the ranks of the unemployed is something we thank God for a thousand times a day.” According to him, this very fear of losing even this trickle of income has caused them to give up any thought of requesting a raise, objecting to frozen wages, or bargaining for benefits. Accepting the existing conditions is the price of job survival. The result of this situation is that two civil servant salaries practically only last until the second week of the month. After two weeks, the bank account empties and they are left with two weeks to get through until the next payday. During this time, they must either reach out to others and borrow money, or get by with exhausting hardship and austerity. It has reached the point where this employed couple has completely given up using their personal car or taxis to get around the city. They walk long distances to metro stations and prefer to use the metro, which costs very little, because in the final two weeks of the month, there is not even money for a few liters of on their bank card for some liters of gas.

Shared credit tabs

This bitter account is not limited to these individuals alone. On the other side of the city, Maryam, a young woman who years ago migrated from a provincial town to Tehran hoping for education and a better future, and who has since found work, has a similar story but from a different angle. She shares a home with two other young women and says that a few weeks ago, for the first time in her life, she was forced to go to the neighborhood supermarket and take a can of tomato paste and a bottle of cooking oil on credit , a difficult and hard to believe experience for her. In the management system of this rented home, so that the financial burden of purchases does not fall on one person’s shoulders, and so that the supermarket owner does not object to the high volume of credit requests, the housemates decided to divide the list of household necessities among themselves. Maryam brings the oil and tomato paste on credit, another housemate takes a few packs of bread and cheese on credit from a different shop, and the third gets beans on credit. This modern division of labor is the survival strategy of three educated young women in the metropolis of Tehran. Maryam explains that even before the recent wave of inflation, they barely managed to cover rent and food purchases with their salaries, but with the sudden surge in rents in the new year and wages remaining unchanged, they have officially entered a crisis. The situation worsened when one of the three, right after the Nowrouz holidays, was laid off and fired from her workplace. Now the burden of her food costs has temporarily been divided between Maryam and the other housemate, until she can find a new job, which so far, given the severe stagnation of the job market and the wave of layoffs, has yielded nothing. This model of communal living, which was once an opportunity for independence and progress for educated young people in the capital, has now become an emergency rescue network whose members lean on each other solely to avoid drowning in a whirlpool of expenses.

The return of the ledger

The geography of buying on credit is no longer confined to the traditional and low-income neighborhoods of the south of the city; [our] investigations show that east, west, north and south Tehran are equally confronting the phenomenon of the return of credit ledgers in supermarkets. One veteran shopkeeper in east Tehran who manages a local supermarket says that even before the new year, people came to buy on credit, but since the beginning of this year, this has become a serious and daily problem for tradespeople. What is shocking in this shopkeeper’s words is the identity of those seeking credit. He says: “Giving credit [to customers] always existed, but you could tell from a person’s appearance that they were not in good financial shape. Now, however, people are stretching out their hands for credit who have been loyal customers of the shop for years, people who previously made large, quality purchases and never had any financial discussion with the shopkeeper. Now these same people, with immense shame and embarrassment and eyes fixed on the ground, resort to well-intentioned lies to preserve their dignity. Phrases like ‘I forgot my card at home,’ ‘the banking network is down,’ or ‘I’ll settle up tomorrow’ are the refrain of a middle class that has no money. They take their shopping, disappear for a few days out of embarrassment, and finally at the end of the month, when they receive their salary, they clear their account or they wait and hope that something might come through.” This shopkeeper emphasizes that if you saw these people in the street, given their well-dressed appearance and respectful behavior, you would never believe they were stuck for 500,000 tomans’ worth of basic daily groceries. The appearance is middle class, but the pocket and the bank card are empty of money to cover bread and cheese. Based on this shopkeeper’s experience, the credit shopping basket of the middle class has completely transformed, shifting from comfort goods toward survival-oriented items such as beans, bread, eggs and canned goods. Every day the number of these customers grows, and the seller clearly understands that these visits stem from outright poverty and the disappearance of the ability to pay cash.

Stealing tuna

Inflation has not only activated the credit-buying sector, but has also brought with it wider social harms, such as the growth of petty thefts from shops. This east Tehran shopkeeper recounts that the figures for theft of small food items have risen sharply. Among these, tuna cans, due to their small size and relatively high price, have the largest share in shop thefts; people hide them in their pockets or under their clothes and leave, and no one notices their absence until the shop’s inventory is checked. He continues: “I understand people’s circumstances. When I see someone is genuinely in need and takes bread or a can, I don’t crack down and I look the other way. But the number of these thefts got so high that economically it was no longer worth it for me either. I was forced to collect all the tuna cans and put them on the shelf behind me, out of customers’ reach. But I still put the breads outside the shop so that if someone is truly hungry and has no money, they can take one.” He goes on: “A few days ago a young man, with a completely tidy and student-like appearance, came into the shop and, with hesitation and a stammer of shame, requested two packs of bread and three eggs on credit. The young man could not even raise his head, and in a trembling voice offered to leave his bank card or ID card as a guarantee with the shopkeeper until he brought the money at the start of the month. I told him, go, son, there’s no need for documents. If you have it, come at the beginning of the month, and if you don’t, consider it a gift. But my question is: as a small local shopkeeper who is himself under the weight of inflation and srent, how many people can I treat this way?”

Asking for half a loaf

The situation in the capital’s bakery trade is no different from the supermarkets. One baker at a bakery in central Tehran speaks of a new phenomenon. He says that with the official rise in bread prices, some customers, who are clearly from the employed and civil servant class come in and request “half a loaf” or a piece of bread, because they do not have the money for a full loaf of sangak [the kind of bread pictured above]. Others resort to different methods; for example, they take five loaves but when paying by card or settling up, they say they took four, so they pay a smaller amount. This baker also points to a change in the behavior of charitable donors. In the past, charitable city residents would, as the expression goes, “donate the oven” so that all the neighborhood’s people could take free bread; but now donors leave sums of money with the bakery to be given only to those who cannot afford to buy bread and are requesting credit. That is, the charity distribution system has also become targeted and directed at the naked poverty of the middle and lower classes, so that the buyer’s dignity is preserved in the neighborhood.

Buying fruit by the piece

Another part of this field report concerns the produce markets and fruit shops of various areas of Tehran — a place where the change in the middle class’s consumption behavior shows itself in its most naked form. A fruit seller near Motahhari Street, where the presence of many private companies and offices draws a large number of employed and middle-class customers to this shop, offers a precise picture of this transformation. He says that buying fruit by the kilo or by the box has become but a memory for a large portion of this class.

According to this veteran shopkeeper: “In the past, employees and middle-class families, when they came to the shop after working hours, would buy at least one or two kilos of each fruit and their basket was full. Today, however, the shop’s digital scale more often shows weights under half a kilogram. Customers in pressed suits with office bags come in and say, ‘Please weigh me three apples, two oranges and two bananas.’ For example, I would say this batch is good, take more but using the excuse that there are few people at home and the fruit would go bad, they settle for just a few pieces. After a few days I realized there simply was no capacity to buy more.”

Impoverished employees

He points to the phenomenon of price-checking and abandoning baskets, saying: “Many customers first ask the price per kilo of fruit, work on their phones a little — as if doing calculations — take a turn around the shop, and in the end leave without buying anything. Prices rise so fast that a fixed civil servant salary cannot keep up with them. Even the phenomenon of taking fruit on credit has started. A long-standing customer whom I’ve known for years comes in and says I have unexpected guests and I’m short of cash, write down these few items of fruit and I’ll settle up at the end of the month.”

Another fruit seller in west Tehran points to increased demand for “mixed and second-grade fruit” from this economic class. He explains: “Previously, middle-class customers always looked for sorted and premium fruit, but now I’ve set up a section in the corner of the shop for slightly blemished or smaller fruit that is cheaper. What’s interesting is that the customers of this section are no longer necessarily the poor; rather, people with an employed and educated appearance spend long minutes sorting through the cheaper fruit to find the sound ones.”

When the engine of society shuts down

The consequences of this economic downfall go beyond changes in diet or the shrinking of the daily shopping basket. Sociologists warn that the elimination or severe weakening of the middle class means the disappearance of social balance and damage to the country’s cultural development. The middle class has always been an intermediary between the lower strata and the state, guaranteeing the stability of society through knowledge, expertise, and civic demands,. When this class is forced to submit to supermarket credit ledgers for bread, eggs and a few pieces of fruit, they will have no energy left to think about development, their children’s education, buying books, going to the cinema, or social participation.

Today, the credit ledgers of Tehran’s supermarkets, bakeries and fruit shops are a perfect mirror of an economy that is barely holding on to its respectable, capable and educated layers. A class that once had aspirations of progress, saving to buy a home, and improving quality of life, is today caught up in the geometry of daily purchasing and surviving through the final two weeks of the month. This slow, dignified, and profoundly painful fall at the heart of the capital is a serious warning to policymakers who are looking for simple and ineffective solutions such as support packages and meager subsidy credits.

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Read also Dr. Kahalzadeh’s latest piece on “Why Devastating Iran’s Economy Will Not Break the Islamic Republic:”

Hadi Kahalzadeh

Why Devastating Iran’s Economy Will Not Break the Islamic Republic

Since President Donald Trump launched the US-Israel assault on Iran in late February 2026, the Trump administration has offered several objectives for the war. They include eliminating Tehran’s ability to project power, obliterating its military capacity…

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20 days ago · 6 likes · Hadi Kahalzadeh

To keep us busy and out of trouble, we were given the task of unpacking boxes of books and putting them on the bookshelves. The books had belonged to a mentor of my father’s who upon leaving Iran had given them to my dad as amanati. To our delight, these keepsakes contained boxes and boxes of pre-revolutionary issues of Zan-e Ruz, a weekly magazine for the “modern women.” Quickly we abandoned our task and snuck these treasures into my room and under my bed, far away from the knowing eyes of my parents. The magazine was glorious! Each issue cover had what seemed to us a scantily clad woman wearing a come-hither look and inside the issues were an endless number of sensationalist stories about the dangers of love, marriage, and sex. Had any of us actually known what these things were, our intense summer readings would undoubtedly had screwed us over but we didn’t, so it didn’t. All it did was fill up our languid afternoons and make us feel like we were the naughtiest girls in town.

This is how we came upon William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, “Jinngir,” translated in Persian and serialized over numerous issues. I read “The Ex-oar-sist,” from the reprint of the English book cover, first in my head and then out loud. “What does it mean?” my younger cousin asked, her face barely containing the excitement coursing through her wiry body. I looked at the Persian title written in large red scary letters that went across the page from right to left. “It means jinn-catcher, see?” I looked away and pointed to what I hoped were the words and not the black and white photo of a girl mid-scream that had been staring at me for the past 2 minutes.

Let’s read it in the dark, my cousin said. So we ran into my new room, pulled the curtains, making my south-facing bedroom dark enough to both read and be scared in, and then stared at the grainy black and white photo of the young girl’s gaping mouth. Then we took turns to read the serialized novel out loud, issue after issue, while the others listened in absolute silence. My cousins were much better than me in creating dramatic effects and in passages that described the ways in which the demon took control of the girl’s body, spinning her head 360 degrees, they would add an extra layer of fear into their voices. We were so uncharacteristically silent that my mother once suddenly opened the door, thinking she was going to catch us doing some not-allowed thing like throwing peach pits on the heads of the boys walking under my window as we had done earlier that summer, only to find three girls in rapture and, it turned out, in abject fear.

All of this was fine and thrilling even, as long as my cousins were around and we slept in my room together talking, talking, and then talking some more. But summer did come to an end, as was its wont, and my cousins went back home to Shiraz to begin a new school year. I was left alone, not only in a new house with a new school year, but also a new school to navigate and no old friends to navigate it with. A feeling of dread that had been knocking on my door ever since we found those Zan-e Ruz issues finally pushed through with my cousins’ departure and the first day of fifth grade.

School was divided into 2 hour time chunks for some subjects that were deemed essential and one hour time chunks for those that seemed less so. What this meant is that I received the same amount of instruction in my favorite subject—math—as I did in my least favorite—religion. Our humorless religion teacher would drone on and one about our souls, how on the day of resurrection we would be held accountable for EVERY SINGLE BAD DEED we had committed and EVERY SINGLE GOOD DEED we had carried out. They would be weighed, she told us, on a scale and whichever side was heavier would determine whether we’d go to heaven or hell. As she talked, I imagined a scale like that of my grandmother’s green grocer’s, made of metal, rickety, with steel weights of different sizes: tiny ones for grams, a bit larger for quarter and half kilos, larger ones for a kilo or two. I imagined a faceless god (I had yet come around to figuring out how I wanted him to look) would gather with his hands my deeds as our grocer would potatoes and dump them on the scale. Thud! my deeds would go.

One day, the religion teacher dropped an A-bomb in the middle of my brain: The world we live in is made of humans and jinns, she said. I stopped dreaming about my future Nobel prize in Physics and perked up. As the Quran tells us, God created humans and he created jinns. They inhabit the world together. There are jinns in this room right now. Then, I felt she looked right at me and said: One, for example, could be just sitting next to you. I looked at the cramped bench I was sitting on, a bench made for 3 small humans that was currently occupied by 4, and seriously wondered how the jinn was fitting there. Was it sitting on my lap? I quickly brushed my uniform as if it had been covered in crumbs to sweep the jinn off me.

That day when I got home and my mom asked how was school? I mumbled ok and went straight to my room. There underneath my bed were the old copies of the magazine with the Exorcist, the jinn catcher, lying where we had left them. I wanted to grab them and dump them in my parents’ room but the fear of the jinn roaming around me, standing next to me perhaps, waiting for me to grab the boxes so it could then punish me for the thought of banishing it, paralyzed me. I sat in the middle of my room. Too embarrassed to verbalize my fears and too fearful to get rid of its source. By nighttime, the jinns surrounding me had seeped through my entire being. My mouth was dry and had turned into the black hole that had been staring out at me from the magazine’s pages. My tongue felt like it was made of concrete.

I could not sleep. No, I mean, I could not close my eyes. For if jinns were there and they could see me, I needed to show them that I too could see them or at the very least, I was fully conscious of their existence. I could not sleep, for sleep, I was sure, meant death, even more than the occasional bombs that were dropped on our heads from Iraqi airplanes.

At the age of 10, I developed insomnia. I could not read. I could not cry. I could not sleep. I could only lie on my back in the dark, my eyes open, my stuffed animals and barbies in bed with me, waiting for the jinns to come and do whatever it was that they did to people who had become aware of their existence. My sallow face and dulled movement, a remarkable departure from my usual sharp, some would say cutting, demeanor towards my family alerted my parents that something was amiss. They sat me down and probed, asking me what was going on, assuring me that whatever it was, it would be ok, cajoling me to talk to them. Exhausted from not having slept for days and from their love, I broke down and spilled the beans. My mother flew into a rage.

She marched into the principal’s office and told her that the religious teacher was harming her child. That I had not slept because of jinns the teacher had said were everywhere. And how was this in line with revolutionary ideals? How can my kid believe in any of this if she’s too tired to even sit? I stood there, slumped against the wall, my hands crossed in front of me wondering if my mother was going to get hauled away for tattling on the religion teacher.

The next time we had religious studies, my black-clad stern looking jinn exposing teacher told the class that while the Quran tells us that jinns exist and live among us, it doesn’t mean they are actually here and it doesn’t mean they will do us harm. It’s nothing to worry about, she said avoiding looking at my row.

I went home and dutifully reported back to my parents: My parents looked relieved and so as not to disappoint them, I swallowed the rest of the report: I DO NOT BELIEVE HER!

Night returned. Outside my window, ambulance sirens wailed as they picked up from the nearby airport bodies of injured soldiers from the front lines of the war. I counted the sirens as if sheep. Still no sleep came.

I don’t remember how many nights and days this continued but one night, as I lay there dying with my eyes glued to the ceiling, my father’s shadow appeared across my darkened room. I knew it was him and not the jinn for he had turned on the hallway light and was standing in the doorway his tall silhouette outlined by his halo. I raised my head, suddenly able to breath. Hi dad! I waved for good measure. My dad slowly walked up to my bed, sat on the edge, and bent over to kiss my forehead. Do I have fever? I asked, knowing this was how he had taken my temperature all 10 years of my life and all the years to come. No, you seem good, he said gently.

I’m here, he said, because I decided to sit in your room and catch the jinn tonight. You sleep, I’ll sit here! Then he got up, took my chair from behind my desk and sat in the middle of the room. I’ll sit here, you close your eyes, and I’ll keep guard. I thought of putting up a fight, of saying no! That’s not how it works. I’m going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it dad. But instead I nodded. I nodded as a wave of grief salted with relief worked its way from my chest and sat on my throat. I did not want to cry in front of my dad. So I kept nodding. Ok, now close your eyes. I’m here, he said from a foot away. If he said anything else, I don’t remember. I finally closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, sunlight was already banging at my windows. I quickly turned my head towards the room and my dad was there, one leg over another as I had left him. Good morning! I said, for once not petulantly. “Good”…I didn’t let him finish. I did not care. I wanted to know one thing: “Did you catch the jinn?” He smiled and said yes, yes I did. It was quite easy and the jinn meant no harm but said he will not be coming here anymore.

I jumped out of bed and hugged him as tight as I could. I did not believe him. I really did not. Ever since the fifth grade I have accepted, without ever articulating it, that there are limits to my rationality and my self-proclaimed scientific mind. Some of these limits, I embrace and pin to my chest like a medal such as the belief that you can and will jinx things if you don’t knock on wood; that saying words out loud confer upon them the power to change the course of things. That if I, for even a moment, let myself be or say that I am content, a shoe would drop or rather, a shoe would be wagged in front of my face to taunt me and show me how wrong I am.

Some of these limits, like the jinns living in our world, I sweep under the rug and act like they are not there, much like I would sometimes do with the dust bunnies in my grandmother’s house. But I always know that if I raise the corner of the carpet, they will stare back at me. But while I did not believe my dad had caught a jinn (for the jinn would have seen him and fled), I believed in him. I believed if he could, he would have captured the jinn, or, to be honest, would have argued with him and finally persuaded the jinn to leave me alone, for that was, and remains, my father’s style.

As the years rolled by and as the war prolonged and morphed from something that was over there—on maps stretched out on our tv sets—to something that was here, here above our heads, raining fire upon us, I held even tighter to my belief that my dad would catch all the jinns in the world for me, and if he could, he would grab my sleeplessness and make it his own. Because that was what he did to make me safe that night, and safety is all that I have ever wanted.

Happy birthday dad!

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For those interested in another form of politics, the kind that arises from dynamics within Iranian society and reveals the ongoing push and pull between various segments of society and the Islamic Republic’s power structure, the final hearing in the rape trial of Iranian celebrity Pejman Jamshidi was a news, and thought, worthy moment.

On October 21, 2025, news broke out that a celebrity had been accused of rape and taken to Qizil Hesar prison. The man in question was Pejman Jamshidi, a former soccer player who had become a famous TV and film actor. Four days later, he was set free on bail. Elaheh Mohammadi, best known as the journalist who along with Niloufar Hamedi broke the Mahsa Amini death in police custody in September 2022 (for which they were imprisoned for 17 months), began reporting on the case for Ham-Mihan newspaper. She wrote that 6 months before the case broke out (i.e. during the 12 day war with Israel), this young woman had gone to Jamshidi’s house to sign a contract when he had allegedly raped her. The accuser had then immediately lodged a complaint against him, had gotten a sexual assault forensic examination that had confirmed she had been assaulted. According to Mohammadi’s October 27th report, DNA testing of the kit had matched that of Jamshidi.

The case caused quite a commotion, with a wide spectrum of commentary. The second and final trial was to have occurred on February 28th but the start of the war delayed it to May 6th.1 A verdict is expected soon. Even if remote, a guilty verdict would be momentous, not only because of who the accused is but because of who the accuser is: a 20 year old woman who seems to not only know her rights but is vocal about them to a broader public.

Today’s translation focuses on two important pieces connected to this trial. The first is Elaheh Mohammadi’s report on the final hearing of the rape case that focuses on the 20 year old accuser’s accounting of the trial. The second is the journalist and anthropologist, Mahzad Elyassi’s piece published in Radio Zamaneh that argues that the case against Jamshidi is not just a legal case but has crucial political and social implications for Iran today.

I have chosen to focus on this today for a number of reasons, many of which are eloquently laid out in Mahzad Elyassi’s piece. Specifically, she points out how the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement’s reverberations continue in the courage of this 20 year old woman who despite a legal system stacked against her, harassment by the accuser, and a society enamored of the accused’s celebrity status, has not backed down. Her seemingly simple message relayed in Elaheh Mohammadi’s reporting that “I want to tell these women: do not be afraid at all,” notes Mahzad Elyassi, reflects the ongoing achievements of the Women, Life, Freedom movement to create a new kind of agency among, at least, a younger generation of Iranians, an agency that is constantly ignored or marginalized in talk of Politics both outside and inside Iran. Her critique of Iran’s intellectual class, which continuously imagines politics as male and relegates gender issues to female spaces (and figures), or marginalizes them, or ignores them is particularly poignant and relevant to the crucial ongoing discussions in Iran of finding a way forward after the doubleshocks of the January killings of the protestors by the Islamic Republic, and the US-Israel war on Iran.2

I want to remind readers of this substack of the importance of not only chasing the news—what was the Iranian offer, what was the American response, what happens in the Strait of Hormuz, etc—during times of crisis but also paying attention to ongoing dynamics and debates within Iranian society. As I’ve written before, the dominant framework in which outside analysts and observers understand Iran has often been one of surprise and/or confusion as if everything that happens there is a bolt from the sky. Sometimes it is, if not a bolt then a bomb, but most of the times events that erupt and make it to the pages of Western media, have been evolving and ongoing, both reflecting and shaping state/society relations in Iran. It behooves us to understand them alongside our daily dose of Roberts and their commentary on Iranian Politics.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. Many thanks to Mahzad Elyassi for giving me permission to translate her article. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

Emtedad [News], Elaheh Mohammadi, May 6, 2026

The final hearing in the case against Pejman Jamshidi was held today. The session had originally been scheduled for February 28, 2026, in Branch 9 of the Criminal Court, but was postponed because of the start of the war between the United States and Israel against Iran.

The case, which began on October 21 of last year with the arrest of Pejman Jamshidi following a complaint by a young woman accusing him of rape, generated major public attention. After the defendant was released on bail, two court sessions were held, with today’s session being the final one.

The complainant, the defendant, his lawyers, and witnesses were present. After hearing testimony from both sides and from witnesses, the previous charges, including forcible rape [تجاوز به عنف], illicit non-consensual intercourse [زنای به عنف با اکراه] and unlawful confinement [حبس], were formally re-read to the defendant, and his final defense statement was taken. According to those present, the case is now close to a verdict, which is expected within approximately 15 days.

Kamiz Borjas, the defendant’s lawyer, told reporters after the hearing that the court had established his client’s innocence and that there was no evidence proving rape occurred. The complainant and her mother rejected those claims in interviews with Emtedad.

The complainant said that during the proceedings the defense lawyers made claims she considered false, including assertions suggesting a relationship akin to marriage, and challenges to forensic medical evidence and DNA testing. She also referred to testimony from a witness who, according to her, saw signs of physical injury on the night of the incident and testified about this in court.

She further said she had recently filed a police report regarding “harassment” by the defendant on Kish Island, where she lives, and that these records had also been submitted to the court. According to her, witnesses attended today’s final hearing and the defendant arrived an hour late:

“Before entering the session, I became very angry and there was a verbal confrontation between us. During the hearing, my statements and those of the witnesses were recorded again, and then the charges of forcible rape, rape under coercion, and unlawful confinement were formally presented to him again, and his final defense was taken.”

The complainant said she reiterated her position at the end of today’s hearing:

“The judge asked whether I consented to reconciliation or settlement, and I answered that under no circumstances would I consent. The judges listened carefully to what I said and reviewed the evidence again. The witnesses’ testimony was also in my favor.”

She also described events from recent days:

“In recent days, Mr. Jamshidi came to Kish Island, where I live, and repeatedly harassed me. I reported this to the police, an official report was filed, and I submitted it to the court. Three days ago, he also offered money to one of my friends, but I still did not agree to settle.”

She said she hopes the court issues a fair ruling:

“I have truly suffered for a year. If I were seeking money or blackmail, as some media outlets and individuals have claimed, I would not have endured all this hardship. I want him and other men like him to no longer be able to do this to any woman.”

She ended by thanking supporters:

“I kiss the hands of everyone who supported me during these months and thank them. We even heard that a barber in Kish refused to cut Mr. Jamshidi’s hair and said, ‘I do not cut the hair of a man accused of rape.’”

She also had a message for other women who might experience similar situations:

“I want to tell these women: do not be afraid at all. I know this is extremely difficult, but no matter how much power, influence, or wealth the other side has, you can still file a complaint and pursue the case. The important thing is not to allow evidence to disappear, to go immediately to forensic medicine, and to know that many people exist who will support you.”

“Why is the Pejman Jamshidi case significant beyond a mere legal trial?” by Mahzad Elyassi, May 11, 2026

The second court session of Pejman Jamshidi, who is accused of “forcible rape” [تجاوز به عنف] was held on Wednesday, May 6. One domestic news agency reported the possibility of a verdict in favor of the defendant. The importance of this case is not limited merely to the fame of the accused or the nature of the allegation. On a broader level, it carries symbolic political and social significance. The meaningful difference in how the accused and the complainant have been treated in this case reveals the government’s, the judicial system’s, and society’s broader approach toward women. For that reason, it extends beyond being merely an individual or judicial matter. The multiple layers of events that unfolded alongside this controversial case require interpretation and analysis. Even the timing of these developments is notable.

This case became public in the months following the twelve-day war between Iran and Israel, a period during which many analysts argued that a “golden window” had opened for rebuilding the relationship between the government and society. During that time, part of the population, driven by nationalism or fears of insecurity, temporarily aligned itself with the ruling establishment in the face of an external threat. One expected that the Iranian government might use this temporary alignment as an opportunity to repair deep social fractures, reduce domestic tensions, and redefine its relationship with society. Yet this opportunity not only did not lead to any reforms or trust-building policies but was gradually squandered through the continuation of previous behaviors, causing the state-society divide to return to its prewar condition. This divide resurfaced months later in protests and the killings during the January unrest.

The tense relationship between Iran’s political structure and women has remained marked by suspension and profound distrust in the years following the death of Mahsa Amini. This period saw intensified monitoring and control over women’s clothing, implementation of the “Noor Plan” as a continuation of morality-police policies during the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi , and the closure of cafés and restaurants over alleged hijab violations. Nevertheless, the suspension of hijab warning text messages during the twelve-day war was interpreted by some as a possible sign of a policy shift or an attempt to reduce tensions between the state and women; an act that could have been understood as a gesture toward repairing relations between women and the government.

However, in the autumn of 2025, two nearly simultaneous events revived the Iranian government’s hostile approach toward women. First was the parliamentary proposal to reform dowry law and limit prison sentences for unpaid dowries (as a mechanism for enforcement of the law) without comprehensively revising family laws in favor of both genders.

Second was the rape allegation case against Pejman Jamshidi, which received widespread media coverage in October 2025. While any event involving sexual violence or high-profile allegations could serve as a test of the judicial system’s willingness to support women, the developments following the arrest of this celebrity suggested the persistence of unequal power structures and the difficulty women face in pursuing justice. Jamshidi was released shortly after posting bail and, despite having a open case in court, left the country. Public support from many of his colleagues in the film and soccer industries received extensive media attention, whereas the website of the newspaper Ham-Mihan was blocked after publishing the only interview with the complainant. Some members of Jamshidi’s family publicly threatened the complainant without regard for legal consequences, and months later, during the height of the second war on Iran, Jamshidi appeared in state media visiting Red Crescent relief activities, with no mention whatsoever of his open legal case.

On the other end is a twenty-year-old woman who lacks the economic and social backing enjoyed by the accused. Despite facing accusations of lying, fabrication, and character assassination, she has continued to pursue her complaint. Victims of rape and sexual violence are often subjected to familiar patterns of blame: “Why were you there?” “What were you wearing?” “Do you have witnesses?” or “How do we know a rape even occurred?” According to her lawyers, the complainant provided answers and evidence for all of these questions, evidence that was reportedly strong enough--even within the deeply gender-biased judicial structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran--to lead to Jamshidi’s initial arrest.

Women who have had the courage to legally confront their abusers have repeatedly described how the judicial system of the Islamic Republic has refused to even appoint female investigators for such cases, forcing them to repeatedly recount traumatic details of sexual violence before male interrogators who fundamentally approach their claims with suspicion. The reversal of the roles of accused and complainant in sexual assault cases, and the unequal treatment of the complainant and defendant in this case, once again raises the question of whether the formal judicial system of the Islamic Republic, which invokes “women’s dignity” to justify restrictive laws against women and employs the slogan “supporting the oppressed” to theorize war with Israel, is in practice willing to convict powerful and influential men when they are faced with serious documented evidence brought by women who lack power and influence.

Beyond its political and judicial dimensions, this case also carries significant social implications including the way Iranian society responds to such allegations. As soon as news of Jamshidi’s arrest became public, waves of reactions flooded social media and online comment sections. These reactions included both supportive and opposing voices, but much of the opposition followed a similar logic: many users described the case as a setup or conspiracy against Jamshidi, while others framed it as an attempt to distract public attention from economic crises, inflation, and government failures.

One striking aspect was the almost uniform support for Jamshidi among many male users, which one can characterize as a form of “male solidarity,” that ultimately sustains and reproduces patriarchy. The hasty support expressed by [the legendary soccer player] Ali Daei for Jamshidi can also be understood within this framework of male solidarity. Even before a final verdict had been issued, this prominent figure used his symbolic power and social capital to offer unconditional support for his friend and “brother,” without ever facing criticism or even questioning for this abuse of influence and dehumanization of the complainant, a powerless twenty-year-old woman. The outright denial of the possibility of rape, without reflection or any attempt to hear the complainant’s account, came from men who from adolescence onward become familiarized with jokes, threats, and language rooted in rape culture that normalize sexual violence. More than any other group, they know that rape is a very real possibility, yet many reacted by aggressively rejecting even the possibility of sexual violence and questioning the complainant’s motives.

Meanwhile, although many women writers and activists addressed the issue from feminist and women’s-rights perspectives, almost none of the prominent male intellectuals or public figures publicly commented on rape and sexual violence, organized discussions, or analyzed the case in media or YouTube programs. The reaction of many male intellectuals and commentators was complete silence. It was as though the issue was considered purely a “women’s issue” unrelated to them, or perhaps discussing a subject tied to the suffering of many women was seen as beneath the dignity of their intellectual standing, or perhaps another form of male solidarity was operating here as well. This silence itself becomes part of the structure that trivializes women’s suffering, marginalizes violence against women, and excludes it from the sphere of public concern.

Yet this support for the accused, whether through attacks on the complainant, silence, or hidden solidarity, was not limited to men. Surprisingly, many female users also attacked the complainant and addressed her with degrading language. Women are more familiar than anyone else with the male-dominated structure of Iran’s judicial system, the treatment of women who speak publicly about sexual violence, and the stigma and pathological fear of “dishonor” embedded in Iranian culture. Nevertheless, instead of empathizing with the victim, some became part of the process of blaming and destroying her. For some users, merely seeing an actor in films and television series seemed enough to create the feeling that they “knew” him and therefore had to defend him. These reactions reveal how deeply misogyny is rooted within layers of Iranian society, and how women in the position of complainants or victims are frequently met with suspicion, blame, and lack of support even from other women.

Another important layer of this case is the generational divide. While Pejman Jamshidi belongs to the generation born in the late 1970s, the complainant belongs to the generation born in the 2000s. For older generation men, accustomed to authority derived from wealth, fame, and social status, the agency and persistence of a young woman who, according to her own statements, continues pursuing the case despite threats and bribery attempts so that “no other man can behave this way toward other women,” carries significance beyond a personal complaint. More than anything, this persistence highlights the differing worldviews and positions of two generations.

The new generation of women in Iran, especially after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, appears more willing than previous generations to bear the cost of speaking out and confronting power, even when aware that judicial, media, and social structures may not work in their favor. For this reason, the case can be understood not simply as a confrontation between a complainant and a defendant, but as a clash between two worldviews: one that still believes in the immunity of powerful men, and another that is no longer willing to remain silent before it.

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In 2016, as editor of Memari News, an architecture and urban planning website in Iran, Yashar Soltani exposed immense corruption in Tehran municipality during Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s time as mayor. He was subsequently arrested and put in solitary detention. (You can read about it here.) He was arrested again in 2019 and 2024.

The text below, published on his site, describes Iran’s internet not just as a technical system, but as a politically controlled infrastructure.1 As noted by Mr. Soltani, repeated internet shutdowns justified on “security” grounds have left most citizens cut off from the global web and forced onto restricted domestic platforms. In this environment, access to full, uncensored internet is treated like a premium commodity rather than a basic utility, creating a system where connectivity itself is stratified by cost, privilege, and political access. His crucial claim is that this structure is not an unintended side effect of regulation, but a system that concentrates control and economic gain in the hands of politically connected organizations while shifting the costs and restrictions onto ordinary citizens. For readers less familiar with the specific organizations mentioned in the piece, fear not! There are a lot of names of companies, foundations, and organizations but the most important part is to look at the linkages he draws between them and the ways in which they are benefiting from the imposed internet blackout in Iran.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. Many thanks to Yashar Soltani for giving me permission to translate it. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

“Highway Robbery by the IRGC Cooperative Foundation2 and the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order3 in the service of Internet Pro” by Yashar Soltani

The Iranian public’s access to the internet has reached the state that hardliners had long wanted. Access to the global internet and its tools has been cut off, and 90 million Iranians are trapped inside a handful of inefficient domestic websites: from Iranian search engines that cannot meet even the simplest needs to messaging apps plagued by bugs and dysfunction. All these years of beating the drum about strengthening domestic capabilities have finally revealed their true result; an inflated elephant has ultimately given birth to a mouse.

The various statements about the future of the internet in Iran offer no clear picture except the addition of yet another major expense to the already high cost of living for Iranians. This is an expense that either is paid to the black market for VPN configurations or handed over as extortion money, a la old-time highway robbers, to Hamrah-e Aval [Mobile Communications Company of Iran, which is the country’s largest network operator] so that one can obtain “Internet Pro” and watch the world through a keyhole.

“Internet Pro”: Discontented Government, Content Shadow Government

The justification for cutting the internet is “security.” This keyword is shared by all officials who speak about internet shutdowns. But does anyone really believe this explanation? A simple example is comparing the prices of two internet products on the market.

A 50GB Irancell package that does not connect to the global internet can currently be bought for around 400,000 tomans [at this moment, the dollar is between 170-180K tomans]. You pay this amount so as not to connect to the global internet so that national security will not be endangered.

Yet at the same time, you can buy 50GB of “Internet Pro” from Hamrah-e Aval for 2.5 million tomans and gain access to the global internet. In other words, if you can bridge the gap between 400,000 and 2.5 million tomans, you and your internet access suddenly cease to be a threat to Iran’s security. Clearly, no one accepts this interpretation. Everyone understands that major profiteers have now reached an ocean of wealth and will not stop until they have fully exploited it.

Amid the chaos of Iran’s administrative and legislative systems, we see that the government [i.e. the executive branch], as the representative of the people, opposes tiered internet access [اینترنت طبقاتی, the term used in Persian for unequal internet access] and “Internet Pro.” Yet ultimately it lacks effective tools in this arena. In reality, the government has little authority over internet policy in Iran. Everything is decided by supreme councils that operate above both the government and parliament.

Because these institutions have no popular electoral base, they have little interest in public satisfaction, yet they are determined to secure the interests of certain groups. The result of this power struggle is the current reality of life in Iran: people are dissatisfied with internet conditions, the government opposes the restrictions but is ignored, and a small group profits enormously. But who are these people? It’s worth examining the ownership structure of Hamrah-e Aval to see who benefits from the current situation and wants it to continue.

The IRGC Cooperative Foundation and the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order: Leaders of Iran’s Internet Patronage [رانت]

Around 90% of Hamrah-e Aval’s shares belong to the Telecommunication Company of Iran. Officially, the company is not state-owned, but everyone knows the unwritten scenario governing it. The telecom company’s largest shareholder is the “Etemad Mobin Consortium,” which holds 50+1% shares and therefore managerial control. Twenty percent of the telecom company’s shares were distributed to the public through “justice shares,”4 while 30% float on the stock market.

The Etemad Mobin Consortium itself effectively controls both the telecom company and Hamrah-e Aval. This is the ambiguous and sensitive part of the story. The consortium consists partly of the “Tadbir Economic Development Group,” affiliated with the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (Setad), and partly of the “Mehr Eghtesad Iranian Investment Company,” affiliated with the IRGC Cooperative Foundation. In practice, the principal operators behind the telecom company and Hamrah-e Aval are these two institutions.

Who Remains Connected During Iran’s Third Nationwide Internet Shutdown?

Since February 28, 2026 [9 Esfand 1404], with the start of the war between Iran, the United States, and Israel, Iranians’ access to the global internet has been cut off for the third time that year [i.e. Persian calendar 1404]. This shutdown is considered the largest nationwide internet blackout in the world. Earlier in the winter of 2025–2026, Iran had already experienced widespread internet instability following protests in January, when internet access was once again broadly disrupted.

The first major internet shutdown of 2025 occurred during the summer amid the 12-day war between Iran and Israel. Afterward, it became clear that despite the shutdown, certain citizens had still been granted access to the global internet.

Now, as the second month of the current widespread internet disruption comes to an end, certain groups still retain access to the global internet at a time when ordinary people and businesses face severe difficulties obtaining access. So who currently has access to the international internet?

1. Starlink Users in Iran

The first group consists of Starlink users, i.e. people with satellite internet who often use it to sell VPN services in Iran. Possessing Starlink equipment has been criminalized in Iran, making access to this service risky. Nevertheless, Starlink-based VPNs are still sold at extremely high prices on Iran’s VPN black market.

2. Holders of “White SIM Cards”

The second group consists of people with so-called “white SIM cards,” i.e. individuals on approved lists whose SIM cards have unrestricted internet access. A few months ago, after an update on the social media platform X, users’ connection locations were exposed, revealing that a significant number of Iranians were connected to the global internet without filtering. Although much attention became focused on journalists, the category of white-SIM users extends far beyond them.

Someone with a white SIM card can buy a static IP address from Hamrah-e Aval or Irancell and create a tunnel to sell VPN services, potentially earning billions of tomans during crises such as wartime conditions.

3. Users with Access to Privileged Servers

The third group consists of people with access to privileged servers in Iran, i.e. servers unavailable to ordinary citizens but connected to the global internet. Given the price of filtered internet sold through VPNs during shutdown periods, it is estimated that these privileged companies have likely earned millions of dollars through internet sales.

One example is “VRoute” (www.vroute.org), which openly and comfortably sells VPN services at large scale and even provides payment gateways for transactions on its website. Technical experts say that regulators can easily identify VPN traffic patterns، especially 1:1 upload/download traffic، and quickly shut VPNs down. Blocking VPN access is technically straightforward and highly feasible. This raises the question: if there is genuine determination to restrict internet access in Iran, why is it not fully enforced? What is the purpose behind creating such a large black market with enormous financial turnover? [To give a sense of how exorbitant this is, the price for one of these services is 3.3 million tomans for 20 GB of data. The average salary of a teacher, for example, before the war was roughly 16 million tomans/month. Inflation currently is around 70%.]

Ultimately, decision-makers must answer why, by shutting down the internet and creating rent-seeking opportunities, they have established a vast and opaque market in which desperate citizens are forced to pay exorbitant costs for internet access, enriching individuals who benefit from powerful insider privileges.

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In a piece published on his telegram channel and translated below, the Iran-based economist, Dr. Mohammad Maljoo provides a framework to think about both why those animations are so popular outside of Iran and yet why they are so problematic. He identifies a distinction between anti-imperialist left and what in Persian is called chab-e mehvar moqavemati or “Axis of Resistance left,” with Axis of Resistance referring to an amorphous coalition of Iran and its regional allies (sometimes carelessly called “proxies”) such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc.

This distinction is a crucial intervention in understanding why throughout the war and beyond (this beyond, which is not post-war considering all that is happening as I type), so many who consider themselves anti-imperialist left could not or would not articulate an anti-war position. This continues during this ceasefire whereby the Islamic Republic is celebrated for standing up to the US and Israel, and for including Lebanon and Palestine as part of their peace conditions, even as Iranians suffer and continue to suffer and will continue to suffer increasing political repression, communications shutdown, inflation of roughly 70% (and more on basic food items), surging unemployment, etc. Iran’s return of fire onto countries in the Gulf during the war (and again beyond) is not considered, or when it is, it is again celebrated as another form of anti-imperialist resistance as if humans don’t live near these bombed out military bases, as if the environmental impact of this awful regional war will remain limited to only those we don’t like. If you rightfully condemn the hollowness of targeting “military sites” on one side, then surely you must also condemn it on the other.

It is possible to occupy an anti-imperialist/progressive/whatever you want to call it position that holds the humanity of all these people in the region in its purview and that does not celebrate the Islamic Republic in order to condemn imperialism. We know it is possible because so many people already do that.

But the challenge is in articulating that position.

While Dr. Maljoo’s text is focused on a specific Iranian phenomenon, in distinguishing between anti-imperialist left and axis of resistance left along four axes—”the relation to the Islamic [Republic] system, the place of political democracy, the evaluation of internal repression, and the comprehension of the agency of societal forces”—he provides a way forward to think more expansively on this issue.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

Anti-imperialist Left or the “Axis of Resistance” Left? by Mohammad Maljoo published on May 4, 2026.

“Axis of Resistance left” is a more appropriate term than “anti-imperialist left” for describing heterogeneous groupings such as “Group 10 Mehr,” “Jedaal Internet TV,” “Danesh va Omid Magazine,” and “Communist Preparation,” and the like.1 Why? Because many leftists are critical of imperialism, but they do not necessarily, in a political and practical sense, align themselves within the formation known as the Axis of Resistance. What distinguishes the Axis-of-Resistance left is not merely opposition to imperialism, but a specific way of linking their opposition to a particular geopolitical configuration.

To understand anti-imperialism, one must attend to its empirical context. This tendency has not emerged out of a vacuum. The harmful effects of imperialism in the lives of Iranians are not abstract; they are part of their lived experience, an experience whose roots extend through the destructive interventions of imperialist powers across contemporary history, and which in recent decades has been reproduced in the form of sweeping economic sanctions, chronic regional destabilization, and ultimately war. The totality of these intertwined factors has led to the formation of a justified opposition to imperialism.

However, opposition to imperialism does not necessarily lead to alignment with the Axis of Resistance. There is an important distinction between recognizing the structural role of imperialism and supporting the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic, a distinction arising from four axes, each of which on its own can set the left on different paths: the relation to the Islamic system, the place of political democracy, the evaluation of internal repression, and the comprehension of the agency of societal forces.

One can be anti-imperialist while simultaneously holding a critical or even opposing stance toward the force that defines itself as the head of the Axis of Resistance. The Axis-of-Resistance left is not like this: it is opposed to imperialism and aligned with the entirety of the Axis of Resistance.

From a methodological perspective, the difference between the Axis-of-Resistance left and other anti-imperialist lefts begins at the point where one important reality, namely, imperialist pressure, gradually becomes their sole lens of analysis. Imperialism, which at first was rightly considered an important explanatory factor gradually turns into the main and determining factor of everything. In the view of the Axis-of-Resistance left, the world at this point is reduced to a simple image: on one side imperialism, and on the other side the Axis of Resistance.

It is here that the first slippage of the Axis-of-Resistance left occurs. Internal issues such as poverty, inequality, repression, and the crisis of representation are no longer regarded as problems arising from within society itself; rather, they are often attributed to the direct or indirect role of imperialism. The real lived experience of the people is not seen as it is, but is instead poured into a ready-made explanatory mold.

When social reality is compressed into such a pre-fabricated mold, the next conclusion is to be expected: the role of the people themselves on the scene is downplayed. Although Axis-of-Resistance leftists consider social protests as signs of real issues in society, they mostly dismiss them quite quickly with the label “tools of imperialism.” Thus, society’s voicing of its demands and reflecting actual contradictions within it are largely portrayed as an opportunity for exploitation by an external enemy. The people are not recognized as the primary agents of change but are mostly reduced to secondary elements in a larger global game. History, in such a narrative, is not the result of human action and choice, but the product of large-scale geopolitical structures.

When the role of the people is pushed to the margins in this way, the view of change naturally changes as well. In such a framework, political caution, which under conditions of external threat is both reasonable and necessary, gradually becomes a permanent rule. The result is that the judgment “now is not the time” is no longer a temporary response but becomes a constant refrain. Since the external threat is, in principle, endless, every demand and every change is continually deferred to an indefinite future. The present is always the time of postponement, and the future always a distant horizon to which change is referred.

When change is continually deferred to the future, another outcome emerges for the Axis-of-Resistance left: disagreements themselves change their meaning. In this space, opposition is not merely a different opinion; it readily takes on a political coloring. Critics are not seen as intellectual rivals but are often regarded as people who are either naïve or who, knowingly or unknowingly, are playing on the field of the imperialist enemy.

Such an outlook cannot be described merely as “anti-imperialist left.” It must be named more precisely and more bluntly: the Axis-of-Resistance left.

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On a Separate Note:

I appeared on the Iran-based program, Panorama, which is part of what I have called Iran’s “grey media,” i.e. media that is not officially sanctioned by the government and is independently produced. Panorama is a socio-political talk show created and produced by Sobhan Yahyaei, a media researcher who created Panorama during the 12 day war in 2025, where a wide variety of topics are openly and honestly discussed by a spectrum of Iran’s fearless thinkers and researchers. Like other such media, Panorama occupies a precarious place in Iran’s media landscape: On the day before we recorded, they had to find a new space since they had been kicked out of their usual studio inside the university. I was invited to the program as part of a new initiative by Panorama to be in conversation with researchers and thinkers outside of Iran and to think through the notion of Iranian diaspora together. You can find my interview and scores of others (only in Persian) here.

I have written before about a transformation in my own identity as both Iranian and American. For the longest time, I thought of my immigrant self as two things added up. I wanted to be both, and in being both, I felt empowered in redefining each of these parts of me to be what made me feel the most at home in this country, in my work, in my own skin. This was not about being proud to be this or that. In fact, it was about existing in an identity of my own making that took all types of pride—national and patriotic primarily—out of the equation. It was, to use a yummy metaphor, an existence where comfort food was both tahdig and peanut butter.

The war has changed all of that on such a molecular level. Not just in the obvious ways (though is it obvious?) but in ways that I am truly surprised by. I’ve had so many conversations these past two months with Iranian friends and colleagues in the US about how heartbreaking the absence of an anti-war movement has felt. The sneaking suspicion that, at times, our friends were maybe okay—maybe more than okay—that the war was going on and that the Iranian government was returning the attacks on it. Or conversely, people who were not not unhappy that the Islamic Republic was finally getting what it had coming. Or at the very least, mostly curious to see how it would all work out. If people died, then well, “every war has casualties.” What’s a little loss of someone else’s life for a touch of revenge or a tickle of curiosity?

So many of us have noted, experienced, and even grieved the ways in which colleagues, people we have worked with for years, have not reached out to say “hey, you ok?” either out of discomfort or some other reason I can’t be bothered to fathom. (When a colleague I barely know emailed me because “when Russia attacked Ukraine…I felt alone in my grief,” and then said they were sure many other colleagues had reached out, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know if I should tell them, actually, they had not.) At first, I tried to understand. I thought it’s better this way. What am I going to say to their sympathy? What can they say to me? But then I told this to someone whose whole family is in Iran—parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends—and they simply said: It’s better to be asked if you’re okay than not, no?

I am genuinely surprised at how so many of my Iranian friends and colleagues in the US have felt alone in their grief. We have theories. We have explanations. We swap horror stories. We wonder how we move forward from here, beyond just forgetting and forgiving.

In Iran the word forgiveness is not used in talking about the segment of the population that in the days before and during the war, cheered, sometimes literally, the bombing of the country. Anything but this was their mantra. The question of how to think about and perhaps heal this immense gash is one of the most sophisticated debates that is currently going on in Iran today.

In the days of the war, people filmed bombs dropping on their city, balls of fire in the sky, plumes of smoke rising up, and you could hear them say “good, good. Hit them”—them being the Islamic Republic, the government that less than two months before the war started had killed an unprecedented number of protesters over two nights. Families tore apart over this. Friend groups broke up. As the war continued, it became clear that the assassination of Khamenei and other political leaders was not going to bring down the system (as anyone with a brain knew it wouldn’t). In fact, the war empowered the Islamic Republic’s most repressive elements, which continued to arrest and execute its citizens as the bombs fell. Simultaneously US/Israeli strikes targeted and destroyed cultural heritage sites, schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, residential buildings, bridges, factories, airports, and industrial sites. Over 1,700 civilian casualties have been confirmed, with 254 of them children.

What is left is this: According to Iran’s central bank, roughly 85% of household incomes now go towards the purchasing of essential food items; according to official numbers, roughly 4 million people lost their jobs directly from the war (which happens when you target factories in which people work), though the number is by multiples higher as the government maintains its internet shutdown and introduces stratified internet access. Donya-ye Eqtesad on April 17 predicted inflation will be between 47% if there is a deal, 71% if this no war no peace limbo continues, and a whopping 123% if war restarts. By one count, inflation is currently at 69%.

I give these numbers to say that the conversations in Iran about how to address, if not heal, the rift in society—when those you know, you love, you sit at a table with, you break bread with, invited and celebrated foreign powers decimating your city and country in the name of istisal—is as vital as reconstruction itself. There are those who say that there should be moral accountability for war’s cheerleaders. Meaning that a moral judgement should be made towards their stance, not, as Mohammad Maljoo argues, to persecute, but to “elevate [our] understanding and strengthen [our] collectivity” by naming “our common pain.”

There are others who advocate “co-existence” instead of “solidarity” as a way out of this great societal schism. The sociologist Mahsa Assadollahnejad, for example, advocates the former for a number of reasons, including the fact that she believes co-existence is post-political. Co-existence, she writes, “gives us three principles: 1) co-dependence 2) shared vulnerability and 3) universal grievability. These principles in turn can decrease socio-political violence and allow for the emergence of an ‘us.’”

There are also those who call for empathy as a political act, because, to simplify a deeply humanistic and complicated position, all the other options are to choose a cycle of never-ending violence. Empathy as understanding and the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes, without the need to agree.

I find that I try, and I fail, to learn from my friends and colleagues in Iran. In their case, this question is fundamental to their projects of charting a path forward from the violence of the past months, if not decades. Some of that violence continues to shape their lives. They cannot and will not give into the despair that anger, fury—violence from outside and inside—wrought upon their lives.

Me? I don’t know. I think I finally found my path forward: I can’t forgive but I can engage in anti-forgiveness and I think for now, that will do.

In Violence and Civility, Étienne Balibar proposes civility (or antiviolence) as a political practice that resists “extreme violence” (or cruelty) as a path towards emancipation and transformation.1 Balibar counterposes antiviolence to nonviolence (turning away from violence) and counterviolence (a second act of violence in reaction to the first) because “the prefix ‘anti-’, as in antithesis, antipathy, or antinomy, designates the most general modality of the fact of ‘facing up to’—from within the polity or community as well—or of measuring oneself against that which is, doubtless, enormous or incommensurable.”

As I said, I don’t even know what it is that I think I need to forgive, or who. The whole question feels so presumptuous to me. Who am I to even pose it? Maybe I think about it so much because I am looking for some kind of closure, though honestly that doesn’t quite seem right to me. Maybe I want to go back to a fantasy of a status quo ante. Maybe I keep returning to forgiveness because I don’t know what else to return to.

If forgiveness is a form of release, then anti-forgiveness is something harder to grasp. To be in a state of anti-forgiveness is to face up to forgiveness and to measure oneself against it without turning away from it as a possibility. It is to remain tilted on the axis, without resolution and but also without collapse.

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I’m sorry, but the late 90s called and want their headlines back. So did the early 2000s and the 2010s.

There seems to be a widespread understanding in and outside Iran that the US/Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28 was a turning point both in Iranian history and Iran’s regional and global relations. It’s a war that has set off a chain of events that continues. Yet it was a war whose consequences, and even its shape, could be and were to some extent foreseen. Post-revolutionary Iran was and is a multi-nodal, decentralized political system where, if you were interested in the facts and not wishful thinking, there was little doubt that it would not fall just because Ali Khamenei was taken out. The “Supreme Leader” fell, and the edifice did not come crashing down as pundits for decades had speculated it would, because it’s a political system built to protect the system itself and not just one person, even if that one person has the name “Supreme” attached to him. Ironically, of course, this was never part of his or his son’s title in the constitution or in Persian anyway. Rahbar and valiye faqih, the Persian monikers for this political office, translate into “leader” and “guardian jurist,” clearly far less useful terms for the English-language press than “Supreme Leader.”

If anyone is supreme in this scenario, it’s these pundits who constantly are wrong and yet somehow see no need to course-correct, let alone hold themselves or be held accountable. It reminds me of how, some years ago at a US think tank, I said the problem with policy analysis here is that something happens in Iran, the analyst says something, they’re wrong, then next time again, the same media, same think tanks, the same platforms ask them again for their analysis. Rinse, recycle, repeat. I was told I had hurt some feelings and an apology would be appreciated.

If this war, which is not over yet, was a turning point, should it not also be an opportunity for pundits, their editors, and the press to just take a breath and ask: maybe we need to tweak how we talk about Iran? It’s not a big tweak. Just change the frameworks and models used in the 1990s for several decades that have not produced correct insights. Just acknowledge history. Is it too much to ask?

Take, for example, the current stampede to read the negotiations’ tea leaves through Iranian infighting and disagreement. As one analysis put it: “Regime factionalism affects external behavior. The Iranian system is beset with factionalism. Decision-making requires consensus; therefore, the number and complexity of these factions, combined with the individual reluctance and inability to make decisions, make it very difficult for the system to change course or to make significant decisions.”

Wait, sorry, this was from 2009.

“The Domestic Politics of Iran’s Nuclear Debate: Leadership Divided?”

No, sorry, that’s from 2014.

I could go on with articles from the 1990s and onwards, but I won’t. You get the gist.

The issue is not, in any shape or form, whether there is disagreement in Iranian decision-making. To say otherwise is to deny reality. But the Iranian political system is not one that tries to hide its political differences. Disagreement is built into the political system itself, as are attempts at consensus decision-making.

The third headline in The Economist’s “A Jungle of Power” jumble is “Which Iran Is America Dealing With?” This notion that a “healthy” Iranian political system is one with a united front is a fiction created by outside pundits in order to keep their plug-and-play analyses going. It’s an ironic fiction, since disagreements over the direction of policy are valorized in other places, such as in the US and in Israel. You don’t send over 70 people to negotiate in Islamabad if you think people with various stakes and opinions are a sign of weakness. (Though I will admit, I was a bit taken aback when I learned the US negotiating team was 300 people. I got asked by journalists multiple times how I understand why 70 people were sent to Islamabad by Iran. Not even once was I asked about the 300-member US team, but I digress.)

The issue at hand is the meanings we assign to the sometimes intense disagreements in the Iranian decision-making bodies. In the current decade’s game of let’s talk about infighting and factionalism amongst Iran’s political elite, the intended or not result is to assign or predict blame for a possible failure to reach a deal and the restart of the war. If the negotiations come to naught, then it was the infighting that made it happen. It was because, to quote the US president, “the infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY [sic].”

In other words, this framework allows us to ignore the realpolitik of how this war was started, why this war was started, and the ways in which the nature of this war has limited the possibilities of negotiating a new deal, a deal that the US did away with in 2018, by focusing on a familiar punditry bogeyman: Iranian infighting and factionalism.

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My mother was 35 years old when she and my dad returned to Iran from America with their two kids—yours truly, age 9, and my brother, age 2. The return would not have been remarkable in any way except for the fact that the year was 1981. The revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty was two years old, the Islamic Republic had been established, and what eventually turned out to be an eight-year bloody war between Iran and Iraq had already begun.

My parents had moved to the US five years earlier to study. In Iran, they had left behind jobs that presumably would be waiting for them, a down payment on a house in the newly built Ekbatan complex, parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, friends—all the things that make a life, a life.

I once asked my parents, “Who leaves America to go back to Iran after a revolution and six months into a war?” My mom shrugged and said, “It was home. We missed home.” I never truly understood what she meant. But I do now. I deeply do.

But I digress. And it’s really hard not to. I want to tell you so much about what it meant to build a life in times like that, to celebrate all that my mother and my father did. As my mom once told me, “We started from below zero when we went back. We would have had a different life if we had never returned.” A true thing if there ever was one.

Almost immediately after the war started, food became rationed in Iran. Food stamps were issued for staple goods: rice, oil, butter, cheese, meat, and other items. Every family was issued stamps giving them a certain amount of these staples based on their size. When state broadcasts announced your grouping, you could go to the store and purchase your ration. Other food items existed in stores, but due to war conditions and a set of reasons beyond this, they were limited or far beyond most family budgets, including ours.

So how do you rebuild a life from below zero when you have two basically American kids you’ve brought back to wartime Iran to live? Sedi, my mother, did so from the most unexpected place. She made, from scratch, the weirdest thing that I personally craved: Thousand Island dressing.

Thousand Island dressing most likely dates back to the late 19th century when, according to my quick Wiki search, it was invented in the upper Saint Lawrence River between New York and Canada. In its basic form, it consists of mayonnaise, ketchup, and chopped pickles—only the last of which was readily available in wartime Iran.

I won’t get into my ode to this weirdly colored, strangely tasting “salad” dressing, other than to say that to this day, if given a choice, I will pick it over all others. I feel as strongly about it now as I did back then, when I was a confused and scared child trying to find my way in a society that was probably as different from San Diego, where I had grown up, as anywhere ever was.

So my mother—never daunted, never afraid, and never one to let something as trivial as wartime food rationing and limited purchasing power stand in her way—set to work. She would make mayo by hand. She would take tomato paste, add sugar and water and whatever else was needed to make something close to ketchup. She would painstakingly chop pickles and make vats of Thousand Island dressing so her firstborn could always have a taste of what felt, at that point, like home.

She would also make vast quantities of potato chips at home, not using a mandoline slicer or any electric or manual device to slice the kilos of potatoes in front of her. No. She would peel the potatoes by hand and then slice them as thinly as she possibly could. Then she spent hours deep-frying them in our kitchen using a pan and immense amounts of precious vegetable oil. To give you a sense of her labor of love, she would make enough to fill a red plastic barrel we had in our pantry that was taller than my little brother. I mention him because nothing delighted him more than getting grounded in the pantry, where his access to these, let’s call them artisanal, potato chips was unfettered.

My mother worked full time. At this point, she had three kids, my little sister having joined our family in 1983. She cooked, she cleaned, she worked, and she made Thousand Island dressing and potato chips so home could feel like home.

And let’s just get this out in the open: no, I almost never helped. I was always busy sneaking a novel into my textbook and pretending I was doing homework. There was a brief period when, under the spell of a Japanese movie shown on state television, I decided I wanted to help in the kitchen—with an important caveat: I would only use my feet. The movie was about a girl born in the aftermath of Hiroshima with no arms who eventually was able to live her life doing everything with her feet. She would chop vegetables holding a knife with her toes, cook similarly, and go about her everyday life armless but with incredible toe skills. I was inspired.

When my exhausted mother would ask me to set the table, I would oblige, but since I did not possess superhuman foot skills, the whole thing would literally come crashing down. I eventually gave in to my mother’s pleas to stop using my feet to put plates on the table. So I went back to reading Alexandre Dumas underneath my bed, where I could ignore the knock on the door and the head poking in, calling out my name.

I don’t know why I keep thinking back to these things today. Perhaps I should have told you about who Sedi Sohrabi is as a person and not just as my mother. That would have been the more feminist way of doing it. Maybe I should have given you her biography—where she came from, who she became, who she is today, on the 80th year of her magnificent birth. Perhaps.

But truth be told, it’s these small memories—memories for which there is no photographic footprint, memories that contain the essence of the privilege of having been raised by Sedi Sohrabi—that are the ones that sustain me in moments of crisis and hardship.

I’ve written before about how I lost god when during the Iran-Iraq war I would pray and pray for the war to end and it just would not. What I did not say is that every time I need to pray (a regular thing when I’m on a plane, a regular thing after February 28), I pray to the joy my mother spreads in this world, to the care she brings to all who know her. I pray, in other words, to the life force that gave us Thousand Island dressing and potato chips.

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According to Reza Salehi Amiri, Iran’s minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts, overall 140 cultural heritage sites were struck during the war across 20 provinces. 63 of them were in Tehran, 23 in Isfahan, and 12 in Kurdistan. Of the best known sites that received news coverage during the war, the damage to the 17th century Chehel Sotoon palace in Isfahan is ongoing in that the decorative features of the palace such as such as the “mirrorwork, wooden elements, and ornamental surfaces” continue to fall at a faster pace than before. This is the case for other sites as well.

The war damage to Iran’s economy and the cost of reconstruction is vast, complex, and a topic for another time. Just in terms of the heritage sites, the cost includes not just reconstruction but also the loss in tourism, an industry that employs around 1.6 million people in Iran.1

A recent statement signed by over 200 scholars, faculty, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of archaeology, history, art history, cultural heritage, and related social sciences and humanities has been released that calls for both accountability for the destruction of these sites and safeguarding against future wars. (To learn more, you can also click here for an interactive map produced by The Middle East Cultural Heritage at Risk in Armed Conflict project)

One of the signatories of that statement is Dr. Eskandar Mokhtari, an Iranian scholar and conservation expert who has led major heritage restoration efforts, including that of the Golestan Palace and the reconstruction of Arg-e Bam in 2003 after a 6.6 earthquake on the Richter scale completely demolished this ancient world heritage site. Dr. Mokhtari is also a former deputy of Tehran’s Cultural Heritage Organization and a founding member of the nongovernmental institute, Tehran Watch [دیده بان تهران] that focuses on conservation and documentation of Tehran’s cultural heritage sites.

The letter by Dr. Mokhtari translated and printed below was sent to my colleague, Azam Khatam on March 18, 2026 at the height of war and Iran’s ongoing internet and communications blackout. A colleague in Iran was able to call Dr. Khatam and read it to her on the phone as she typed it on her computer. After that with great difficulty, Dr. Khatam sent the text back to ensure she had taken down the information accurately. We then translated it and tried to get it published in major newspapers but were told the topic had already been covered.

We don’t believe it has. As Dr. Mokhtari warns at the end of his letter without proper attention and action “the damage unfolding in Iran will not be an exception. It will be a precedent.”

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

The Destruction of Tehran’s Cultural Heritage By Dr. Eskandar Mokhtari

Since February 28, when coordinated air and missile strikes by the United States and Israel against Iran began, a significant number of the country’s historic buildings have been destroyed or damaged. Alongside the mounting human toll, more than 110 historic sites across the country and roughly 60 in Tehran alone have been damaged, according to preliminary reports.2 These are not incidental losses. They point to a pattern that raises urgent questions about the protection of cultural heritage in modern warfare.

For those who have studied and worked to Iran’s heritage sites, the damage is not abstract. Consider the fate of Golestan Palace in central Tehran, widely reported in the Western press. For centuries, it has stood as a layered record of Iranian history, with roots in the Safavid era and its defining form shaped under the Qajar dynasty. I have known the Golestan Palace complex in detail for three decades. In 1995, when the Ministry of Justice proposed construction within the surrounding grounds of the palace, the Cultural Heritage Organization commissioned a [site] evaluation. I led that effort with colleagues. We believed that even a careful clearing of the site would reveal the remains of Tekyeh Dowlat, Iran’s first purpose-built performance space. Though demolished during the Pahlavi period, its remains persisted underground. In less than two weeks, we uncovered part of its plan and the construction proposal was halted.

At the time, it seemed that the site had been secured for the future. In later years, as I began teaching at the university, I continued research on the Golestan Palace and worked toward its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list. That designation, achieved in 2013 through the efforts of many colleagues across academic, governmental, and civic institutions, was widely understood to strengthen protections for the site. It did not anticipate the kind of risk now facing it.

In the first wave of attacks [in the 2026 US/Israeli war], the palace complex was severely damaged. Doors and windows shattered. Delicate wooden structures collapsed. The mirrored ceilings of its famed Hall of Mirrors, immortalized in a celebrated painting by Kamal-ol-Molk, were broken apart.

The destruction has not been confined to a single site. The Sa’dabad complex in northern Tehran, once home to Qajar and Pahlavi rulers and now the country’s largest museum campus, has also suffered extensive damage. In the city center, historic buildings in Baharestan Square have been struck, along with key political landmarks including the former parliament and senate buildings. In one case, a missile brought down the roof of the Senate’s main hall, an architectural feature inspired by the dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan. Even public squares, the shared civic spaces where history is lived rather than displayed, have not been spared. Baharestan Square and Arg Square, both tied to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution and Iran’s struggle for freedom, have sustained damage. So too have the storied Ferdowsi Square and other urban landmarks that form part of Tehran’s collective identity.

Beyond the capital, the scale of destruction is equally alarming. In Isfahan, Chehel Sotoun Palace and the Naqsh-e Jahan Square complex, both UNESCO-listed sites, have been seriously damaged. These are places that have endured for centuries, surviving political upheaval and regional conflict. Their vulnerability today underscores a troubling reality: the norms meant to protect cultural heritage in times of war are increasingly fragile.

International law is not silent on this matter. The 1954 Hague Convention the Protection of Cultural Property, to which US, Israel, and Iran are all signatories, and related agreements explicitly require the safeguarding of cultural property during armed conflict. These rules exist because the destruction of heritage is not only a local loss. It is a global one. When such sites are damaged, humanity loses part of its historical record.

The stated aim of precision targeting in modern warfare is to limit harm to civilians and nonmilitary structures. Yet the evidence emerging from these attacks suggests a different outcome. Historic city centers, dense with cultural landmarks, have been struck repeatedly. Whether through intent, indifference, or failure, the result is the same.

What is at stake is more than architecture. Cultural heritage anchors identity. It tells societies who they have been and, by extension, who they are. Its destruction severs that continuity. It leaves behind not only physical ruins but a deeper rupture in the narrative of a nation.

There is still time to act. International organizations, cultural institutions, and civil society must press for adherence to the legal frameworks already in place. These are not symbolic gestures. They are necessary steps to ensure that the protections promised on paper are honored in practice. If they are not, the damage unfolding in Iran will not be an exception. It will be a precedent. And the next time war comes, as it inevitably will, the world may find that it has grown more willing to accept the loss of its shared past.

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The texts below are written by Mojtaba Kashani. After receiving his BA in Iran, Mojtaba received his masters in global affairs from University of Notre Dame and eventually began his doctoral studies in sociology Carleton University in Canada. When the 12 day war began in June 2025, he left his studies and returned to Iran where he currently resides.

On April 5th, Mojtaba sent me his war writings and a text by Zahra Sabbagh chronicling her war experiences 48 hours before the US president’s deadline and threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” I published Zahra’s here under the title “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, All Wrapped Up in One, in Iran.”

Then on April 12th, he sent me another text, which he called: “There was No Agreement.” There Mojtaba begins with the collapse of the talks but then chronicles how right before the ceasefire began, 6 of his beloved’s family members were killed in a US/Israeli strike on a house in Tehran, referencing relatives of Zahra whose haunting words were written and published right before this tragic event. I asked for their permission to explicitly link the two texts through their relationship as a way to further add layers to their writing and experiences. I recommend reading both Mojtaba and Zahra’s evocative writings here to get a singularly full picture of the ongoing toll of the war and ceasefire on people in the region. I am grateful to both of them for trusting me with their words and their life stories.

Below I have published Mojtaba’s texts in reverse chronological order. First, his latest piece and then I have also included excerpts of his earlier text written in the midst of bombings to give a sense of him but also to explain why he left Tehran for the relative peace of another town, which he references in the text below.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with a wide spectrum of perspectives and analyses published inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

There Was No Agreement by Mojtaba Kashani1

April 12, 2026

This morning I started my day by watching a speech by [US Vice President] J.D. Vance, the one they said was the last remaining peace-seeker in the American government. A bit of preamble and nonsense, followed by a brief conclusion: no agreement was reached.

It’s still too early for any kind of judgment, and some believe this story is far from over. I try to keep my anxiety manageable with tea, frozen bread, and cheese. It does the job of meditation and yoga for me. I don’t know how many kilograms I’ve gained since the first day of the war. But today certainly hasn’t been the hardest day of recent weeks for me. Each day of this war has had its own tale, full of hope and fear, dread and anxiety. But one of them [April 6] still hasn’t faded from my memory.

Perhaps it never will.

I wake up early in the morning. I shouldn’t be awake at this hour. Out of habit, I reach for my phone. It was plugged in overnight, and I feel reassured knowing that if we’re dragged back to the Stone Age, I’ll be able to carry it with me for two extra days. My new morning routine is checking the news and reading personal messages. I open the local app. She is online. I’m a bit surprised since she usually isn’t awake at this hour. I say hello. Immediately, my phone rings. She tries to tell me something though sobs and tears, but her words are unintelligible. The words get lost between her cries. Her sentences break apart. I’m on the verge of a heart attack from fear when I hear this: we’ve been ruined [بدبخت شدیم]… they struck… they’re all dead…

An American missile, guided by advanced precision fighter jets, targeted a house in the middle of the night. Several people, men and women, old and young, were killed instantly, and dozens were seriously injured. No one has even had a chance to announce how many homes were destroyed.

I’m in shock. I can’t even find a way to express my anger and rage. I barely find an empty seat on the first bus and head back to Tehran. The last time an explosion went off right next to me [see below], I was so terrified that I decided not to return to the city [Tehran] until the war was over. I had thought I could get away from the missiles and keep myself safe. But what about the lives of my loved ones? Or the loved ones of my loved ones? I had fled the war, but there is no escaping it.

I don’t have time to pack. My laptop, a toothbrush, and a black shirt. Even that is more than you need in wartime. I don’t have time to go home. I change my clothes in the bus terminal restroom and put on the black shirt. I go to a café and wait [for her]. We hold each other tight. My embrace won’t bring anyone back to life, but I don’t know what else to do. I try to listen and empathize. Everyone is dead except one person. The tea tastes bitter, and the sugar crystals turns to paste in my mouth. I swallow the lump in my throat. I smoke several cigarettes in a row, and only at the end do I remember that I don’t even smoke. I wish I could express my anger but not here with tearful eyes and trembling lips. I don’t know where to place this fury.

The next morning, I wake up in horror. Less than 24 hours remain until the deadline set by the president of the cradle of modern democracy to drag us into the Stone Age. What does the Stone Age even look like? Who will enslave us? The prime minister of the only democracy in the Middle East, not to be out done, has also announced that we should stay home until 9 p.m., as they are going to blow up many places: roads, railway lines, bridges, and…

I’m scared, but I don’t intend to leave Tehran. Mom and Dad are deeply worried. Yesterday I had rushed to take the bus so quickly that there had been no chance to say goodbye to them. No one’s said a word but I’m sure we’re all thinking: What if we never see each other again?

Each hour brings new news. With each explosion, we’re pushed months or years backward. Bus tickets are selling out. I eventually buy one. I have a few hours [before it departs]. I find a café in the middle of the city to be alone with myself. Unlike the streets, the café isn’t that empty. I find a cozy seat by the street. I scroll through the news on the domestic app. It all contradicts each other. Out of sheer idleness and loneliness, I just sit and watch people. A girl is sitting on a bench by the side of the street, smoking carelessly. She says she’s tired and prays: “Let it hit, let it [all] end and be over.” I think of the people who formed human chains on bridges and near power plants. I wasn’t there, but even seeing those images and hearing the melody of the kamancheh [a bowed string instrument] stirred a faint lump in my throat.2 What if they really do hit and end everything?

I get on the bus. Not a single empty seat. By sheer luck, I’ve managed to buy a limited-data VPN at a high price. I read some news and analysis. Not even two analysts say the same thing. Someone on Al-Jazeera has said that Israel might, for the first time, use a controlled nuclear bomb to consolidate its power. One says Trump is bluffing; another says he’s serious. I don’t know which to believe.

Social media is eerily silent. I glance at Telegram groups of Iranians living abroad. They are counting down the time until the deadline, just like people standing in Times Square waiting for the New Year ball to drop. But here, the fireworks kill people. Real people with real stories, dreams, fears, and hopes. I decide to save what little VPN data I have left and doze off until I reach my destination.

The rideshare driver drives in silence. She only asks me if we can stop at a gas station along the way. I agree since who knows whether there will be any gasoline tomorrow. It’s past midnight and the asphalt is wet from rain. The streets are deserted, and the singer sings:

“Kiss me, kiss me
For the last time
Goodbye to you
As I go toward my fate”3

What if that meeting in the café, in black clothes, was truly our last? It shouldn’t be like this. Just now, the news says Trump is considering a two-week ceasefire proposal put forward by Pakistan or as some domestic media call them, our Pakistani brothers. What illusions we had that the white men would bring us peace. My heart warms a little.

“Amid the storm, allied with the boatmen
We must pass beyond life itself, beyond the storms”

They say grief has stages. I’m not sure how accurate that is. But this favorite song of mine has pushed the peak of my anger to the surface.

I remember a poem by my favorite poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

“I am still alive…
A thousand thanks for this unexpected blessed event
Presidents in America are trying
To make America turn on the drinking water.
How shall we wash the dead?
And America, atop the fences,
Gives every child
A cluster bomb toy for death

America is the plague itself
And the plague is America…”4

An Excerpt from “Tonight I was Killed” by Mojtaba Kashani

March 29, 2026

Tonight I was killed. My soul was torn from my body and fell onto the ground. The earth trembled, it gave way beneath my feet, and it became certain to me that I would never see tomorrow morning.

I’m sprawled on my bed, my eyes heavy. Silence has taken over everything. With five heavy blows, I jolt awake and, terrified, rush toward a place I imagine is safe. Mom, unconcerned, bangs a spoon against the pot to scrape off the bit of stew stuck to it. I curse the spoon and go back to bed.

I’m angry that I couldn’t tell the difference between a metal spoon and a missile. I lie back down and pull the blanket over myself. I’m suffocated by the heat, but the weight of the blanket reassures me. As if I think it’s a shelter that will protect my life.

…

After days of continuous rain, the sky has cleared. Now I can see the whole street and easily distinguish the sounds of drones, air defense, fighter jets, and missiles. There’s no more sound of pouring rain or sudden thunder. I get lost in my thoughts and my eyes close. I see nothing but endless, dense darkness.

I wake up in terror. Screams come from outside. My brain isn’t working, but my body is doing everything it can to survive. Luckily, I have clothes on. Mom and I take refuge in the hallway, thinking we’ll be safe from the windows. Deep down I know this is a false sense of security, but I want to believe this is not the last moment of my life.

I start going through the wartime instructions one by one: during an explosion, stay away from windows, lie on the ground, place your hands over your head and ears, and keep your mouth slightly open to avoid the blast wave. But then what? I’ve forgotten. I can hear my own heartbeat. That means I’m still alive. I struggle to breathe. Fear must have stopped my breathing for a moment, and now my body is fighting to regain the lost oxygen.

…

Suddenly, a deafening sound rises from the sky—like a thousand warriors blowing into a single pipe, or spectators blasting their horns. The sky over Tehran seems to tear open. I feel like a phantom is hovering above us. I’m frozen in fear, following the sound with my ears. With several powerful strikes, the ground lifts from its place. The building sways. The windows tremble and bricks fall from the walls. I’m terrified, collapsed into myself. I’m stunned. There’s no prayer I can whisper to calm myself.

Again, the sound of the sky splitting. This time I’m certain it will land directly on my head. Each blow is heavier and closer. Now I’ve truly become a frightened animal, reduced to primal instincts. Like a dog, I pant to gulp down some oxygen. My heart feels like it’s being torn out. I think to myself: if my heart bursts out and blood gushes, who will take responsibility? I don’t even know the name of the precision pilot.

A few minutes pass, and the city falls into a deadly silence. I stretch slightly and slowly remove my hands from my ears. Carefully, I take a few deep breaths and convince my body that the danger has passed. I glance around the house. Everything seems to be in place. My hands are trembling. I feel like a wandering spirit. I don’t want to see myself in the mirror. I’m afraid the chariots of death will return. I’m certain that this time my skull will be split open. We leave everything behind and rush out of the house.

…

Twenty-eight days have passed since the war began, and I have never felt this helpless and desperate. The night has sunk into a dense darkness and stretched longer than ever. The street is empty, the house is dark, the pilots are resting—and I am glad that before my birthday arrived, I did not become an inevitable casualty of war.

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(From the instagram account of a journalist in Iran, which says: Connect that Internet! Connect it.)

On April 7, a ceasefire was announced in the US/Israel war on Iran, a ceasefire that did not include Lebanon but eventually led to a stoppage in the daily bombardment of Iran. Nonetheless, the internet and communications shutdown that began on February 28 continues. This continued shutdown diverges from the Islamic Republic’s own practices whereby after the ceasefire announcement of the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, the internet was restored. It was also restored after 3 weeks in the aftermath of the January protests and the brutal crackdowns on January 8 and 9, 2026.

The ability of Iranians to access worldwide internet remains limited to whitelisted accounts and expensive black market proxy configurations. As the economist Mohammad Maljoo has written several times on his Telegram account during his own intermittent connection, this blockage has unequal consequences and extends Iran’s economic disparity to something as fundamental as internet access.

An important arena where the internet shutdown has had a devastating effect is on journalism, particularly print journalism. Iran’s media ecosystem is complex and precarious, ranging from official governmental channels to independent media, to “in-between” channels that are allowed to function but are not officially sanctioned, to numerous Telegram channels with thousands of followers that operate from inside the country, to those that operate outside but have domestic readers, to diaspora media. (I spoke to a bit about some of the domestic media in an interview here.)

Below are translations of two important pieces from Iran that focus on the effects of the war and the ongoing internet shutdown on the ability of journalists to continue their vital work. The first piece was published in Shargh newspaper on April 6th and details the layoffs, newspaper closures, and the shrinking of the press in the Persian calendar 1404. It’s important to know that the year 1404 encompasses two devastating wars and the December/January protests and their subsequent crackdowns. The second piece is a statement put out by the Tehran Journalists’ Guild, a labor union established during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, on April 9, 2026, warning against both the continued internet shutdown and the labor force reductions.

If there is one thing I want the readers of this Substack to always remember, it’s how crucial it is to understand Iran as it is, not as we imagine it to be. In translating these two pieces side-by-side, I hope what you take away is not just the difficulties of the work journalists and media do in Iran but the ways in which they continue to fight for and succeed in creating space for knowledge and debate despite these difficulties and at great cost to themselves.

Shargh newspaper’s report on the layoffs and unemployment of journalists and the closing of some media in the new [Iranian] year by Niloufar Hamidi published on April 6, 2026

The year 1404 (2025 mostly) tragically ended for Iranian journalism; widespread layoffs, the closure of several newspapers, and the failure to pay the salaries of many journalists made the New Year’s holiday bleak for media professionals. Over a hundred staff members, including journalists and administrative personnel, were laid off from one of the largest private media outlets in the country, Payam-e Ma. On the other hand, Ham Mihan, which had previously built a strong reputation over the years, ended its operations until further notice, leaving dozens of journalists effectively unemployed. Meanwhile, Ham Mihan, which had already been shut down earlier due to judicial intervention, informed its reporters in the last days of Esfand (the last month of the Iranian calendar year) that it would no longer publish, and the Shabakeh magazine also announced that it would cease publication. Alongside all of this, several journalists from Aftab, Shargh, and other media outlets have reported not receiving their salaries and Nowruz bonuses for Esfand. Although the Press Department of the country claims to offer support, it seems that the blow dealt to the country’s press is irreparable, and the simple promises of support are not enough to address the extent of the damage.

The Shock of Layoffs in Two Media at the Same Time

Fatemeh Babakhani has been writing in various media outlets across the country for many years. Her area of expertise is the environment, and throughout these years, she has consistently focused on issues related to the natural environment of this country in her reporting. Now, she is one of the journalists who has lost her job. The first blow came when she learned that the newspaper Payam-e Ma1 would not be published until further notice:

“According to what the media managers told us, the newspaper, in the form it used to be published, will not exist until further notice. Of course, they explained that we could continue working as freelancers, and content would be published on the newspaper’s website. But it’s clear that with a freelance journalist’s salary, you can’t sustain a living. Especially in the current economic conditions of the society.”

Until this year, Babakhani worked simultaneously for two media outlets, and unfortunately, both of these outlets laid off staff. The second outlet she worked for, Donya-ye Eqtesad, where her job insurance was also covered, also made cuts:

“At the end of the year, the section editor gave us the news about staff reductions. Then, they called from Human Resources and told us that such a decision had been made, and the list of names was sent. Fortunately, I have the chance to keep my insurance through another media outlet, so I don’t have to resort to unemployment insurance.”

She explains that neither she nor the other staff members expected to face such a situation just a few days before the Nowruz (Persian New Year) holiday:

“We really didn’t think that instead of receiving our Nowruz bonus, we would be laid off. When the newspaper was closed, I had told myself that at least I worked for two outlets, so I would have at least one job. But suddenly, the news of the Donya-ye Eqtesad layoffs came, and it was very shocking.”

This journalist says that, apart from financial issues, the way the workforce was cut has long-term effects on the psyche and well-being of workers: “One aspect of this issue relates to financial and economic matters, which, of course, are not trivial. In the current situation, where everything has become significantly more expensive due to inflation, the economic aspect is not considered a normal issue in people’s lives. However, in the case of layoffs, it’s not just the economic dimension that pressures individuals. The feeling that suddenly you, as a skilled human resource, are being sidelined, jeopardizes the well-being and mental health of individuals, and disrupts their entire lives. There was a time when layoffs in media had significant reverberations. But now, these behaviors and approaches seem completely normalized.”

Unemployment on the Eve of the New Year

Mojgan Mirzaei, a veteran economic journalist, stopped working with Donya-ye Eqtesad last winter. She now talks about the situation at the outlet:

“We knew there were plans for layoffs. There had been rumors circulating for months within the organization. But no one imagined that the management would make such a decision just before Nowruz. Everyone thought that if such a decision was to be made, it would be after the 13th of Farvardin (the end of Nowruz holidays). So, it was accompanied by a wave of surprise and, of course, disappointment.”

She also acknowledges that the situation is difficult for the media managers as well:

“Of course, we journalists also know that the economic conditions for media managers are not favorable. There has been a reduction in liquidity. The income from advertisements had also decreased in recent months. This has affected the overall income of the newspaper. As a result, it seems that the easiest way forward was to lay off staff.”

Referring to the number of employees who lost their jobs at Donya-ye Eqtesad, she explains:

“We don’t have an exact number, but based on what we saw and heard, around 70% of the staff has been laid off. About 50 journalists from the newspaper itself were let go. Dozens of administrative staff were also affected. There were also a few layoffs from the Echo section. Additionally, the newspaper, which used to be published with 32 pages, was reduced to 16 pages, which is also an unfortunate event for the country’s press.”

According to Mirzaei, this decision could set a precedent for other media outlets:

“Donya-ye Eqtesad is arguably the largest private media in the country. It’s a large outlet that employed a lot of people, and many journalists have worked there over the years. This decision, with such a large-scale impact, could lead other media outlets to follow this approach to cut their costs. It’s clear that in these economic conditions, media managers may think, ‘If I can produce a newspaper page with just one person, why should I be responsible for the salaries and insurance of several people?’”

This journalist concludes by highlighting the lack of support from relevant institutions:

“Journalists have been struggling with difficult living conditions for years. Newspapers have been shutting down one by one. Salaries have decreased and decreased. Gradually, media managers started refusing to insure them, and if it weren’t for organizations like the Sandoq-e Honar [Art Credit Fund was established in 2004 and is under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture. Among its responsibilities is to provide insurance and support to unemployed journalists, artists, and writers] providing insurance for journalists, many would have to work without insurance. Even now, most of them are insured at a basic level and don’t receive quality insurance. Professional associations have also significantly weakened in recent years, and the current guild really doesn’t do much to improve the living conditions of journalists. The Ministry of Culture and Guidance mainly interacts with media managers, not journalists. That’s why journalists in this country are practically working without any supporting organizations, doing one of the most difficult jobs in the world.”

However, the damage to the media does not end with layoffs. Some media outlets have also refused to pay the salaries of their staff for the month of Esfand (the last month of the Iranian calendar year). Reports indicate that several news agencies and newspapers have not paid the salaries of their employees for Esfand, nor have they given their staff Nowruz bonuses. One of the journalists who wished to remain anonymous said that they were simply told: “We don’t have money!”

Unremitting Pain

Hooman Azimi, the Director-General of Domestic Media and Press, talks about the economic challenges that media outlets have faced, which have intensified since last year. He tells Shargh:

“We have been dealing with this problem since last year and have tried to monitor all developments around this issue. The current economic problems in the country, combined with sanctions and the war, have created additional pressure on media professionals. Now, the increase in the minimum wage by 60% has caused serious concern for media outlets that lost their income last year.”

Azimi, listing the supportive measures for media outlets, continues:

“There have always been various supportive measures on our agenda. For example, the head of the Press Department has emphasized supporting media outlets that employ more staff and provide them with insurance. We wanted to support the employment of journalists. Government advertising is also part of our work, which helps media managers and their revenues, and can cover a significant portion of expenses. Amid this crisis, the Minister of Culture and Guidance visited the Press Department and decided to update the rates of these government ads from the beginning of the year and increase their amount. It was important that the income from these ads remain the newspapers’ revenue streams.”

The Director-General of Domestic Media also mentions special support related to the war: “There was also the decision to provide special subsidies to media outlets that have been covering the news despite all difficulties and risks during the war… Just like we did during the 12-day war. Utilizing the Sandoq-e Honar’s insurance provisions, as well as unemployment insurance for those who lost their jobs, is also part of these support measures during the war.”

Azimi concludes by explaining that the Press Department’s guidelines emphasize ongoing support for human resources:

“In the guidelines we send to media outlets, we stress that reducing staff or eliminating positions should not be their first option. Reducing the number of newspaper pages, focusing more on digital versions rather than print versions, and cutting or eliminating other indicators are better solutions for managing costs and saving resources because layoffs and dismissals also harm the creative and intellectual process.”

Tehran Journalists’ Guild in a statement issued a warning about the situation of media and the livelihood of journalists on April 9, 2026

In a situation wherein the country needs professional, responsible, and reliable media more than ever to strengthen national unity and enhance public awareness, the ongoing economic pressures and infrastructural limitations have posed serious challenges to the survival of both print and online media, as well as the livelihoods of journalists. If this trend continues without attention, it could lead to the weakening of the country’s social and media capital.

The Tehran Journalists’ Guild, understanding the sensitive conditions of the country and the necessity of the media’s cooperation in fulfilling their national role, believes that the sustainability of the media is an inseparable part of social and economic stability and security. However, evidence on the ground indicates that, in recent months, the exacerbation of financial problems of media institutions, alongside a significant increase in production costs, especially in the areas of paper and printing, reduced revenue sources, particularly in advertising, and disruption in access to internet communication infrastructures, have created additional difficulties for the operations of many media outlets.

In this context, communication restrictions and the cutting off of international internet access have had even deeper effects on the performance of online media. The disruption of access, the limitation of some communication platforms, difficulties in publishing and distributing content, and disruptions in two-way communication with audiences have effectively disrupted some of the core functions of digital media. This situation has not only reduced timely information dissemination and professional competition, but also led to a noticeable decline in viewership, reduced traffic and advertising revenues, and weakened the position of domestic media in the information space.

As a result of these conditions, some newspapers have been forced to reduce their volume and the number of pages, while several other media outlets have limited or ceased their operations. Simultaneously, internet-based media have also faced decreased efficiency and income due to reduced audience access.

The concerning consequence of this trend has been the emergence of a wave of workforce reductions in the months of Esfand and Farvardin [March and April roughly], leading to the unemployment of some journalists and media professionals. This not only adds to the economic pressures on this group but also results in the loss of some of the country’s professional capacity and valuable media experience.

It is evident that under such conditions, the continued operation of professional and independent media requires at least the minimum necessary economic and infrastructural support. Ignoring this necessity limits the media’s ability to perform accurate and timely information dissemination, and it can also create a foundation for a decrease in public trust and the weakening of responsible information flow.

Since the Tehran Journalists’ Guild became aware of the difficulties faced by media colleagues (last March), the guild’s board president has contacted some relevant media managers and explained the difficult situation in the country and urged them to stop or at least delay the workforce reductions until the new year. Unfortunately, these requests and consultations have yielded limited results.

Therefore, the Tehran Journalists’ Guild, while emphasizing the need for media support, draws the attention of relevant authorities to the following issues:

• Immediate measures to manage and reduce the costs of paper and printing supplies for newspapers.

• Facilitating sustainable access of online media to communication infrastructures to maintain effective contact with their audiences.

• Designing and implementing support mechanisms to prevent layoffs and assist unemployed journalists.

• Strengthening constructive dialogue with media trade organizations to utilize expert capacities in managing the current situation.

The Tehran Journalists’ Guild, while emphasizing the responsible and professional approach of the media, declares its readiness for any cooperation that may improve the situation for its colleagues and hopes that effective and timely decisions will be made to preserve and strengthen this vital pillar of society in light of the current conditions.

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“I think there will be a deal,” she wrote. “Because if I don’t, the anxiety will kill me.”

I’m supposed to leave in 15 minutes to go see the ocean. Seeing the horizon might do me good, I’m told. But I’ve been watching the clock tick towards my departure time, and I haven’t been able to move.

I can’t make myself get up and do the things you need to do to make time travel forward: Pack a bag, lock up the house, get in the car, go to the ocean, see it. My paralysis is not so much from anxiety. Anxiety has been my companion for these past weeks. The paralysis is born from an anger I do not know where to place, what to do with, how to let go.

Because the fact of the matter is: We did not have to be here. This did not have to happen. And when the debris settles, everything that made it possible in this country, will remain the same. The apathy, the disinterest, the lack of information, the refusal to hear, let alone accept, the humanity of people on far shores, the humanity of those on this shore.

I keep thinking this is an inflection point in my life. I don’t know if I can ever go back to thinking of this place I live in, and have lived in for the past 35 years, as my home. Someone in Iran wrote: “home is a place where we feel comfort and safety, a place where our bodies are not tense and constantly braced for danger.” This is not my home anymore. I don’t know what to do with this feeling either.

My interlocutors, friends, and colleagues in Iran in the midst of all these bombs falling and in the middle of a society that has ripped itself apart, with some saying come and bomb us and others horrified at the thought, keep articulating how empathy is itself a brave political act. As one put it: You do not need to agree with the person to have empathy. But you need to have empathy to rebuild this place.

The Persian word for empathy is hamdeli, to share a heart. I think to myself, if those people who are being threatened with civilizational destruction can try to share a heart, then I should too. But then, I watch the clock tick, I sit here, and I hold my fury in my heart. I will not share my heart, only this feeling that I do not know where to place.

I told Rahaa today I feel the minute I can go back, I want to go back to Iran. I told her, I want to spend the rest of my life over there. She laughed and said don’t quit your job. It’s too expensive here.

When my mother a week ago has said she wants to go to Iran, I’d just rolled my eyes (sorry mom!) so I’m surprised by how I feel. I spent 35 years making sure I’m not that person. The one with feet on one shore and heart on another. And here I am exactly who I hoped I wouldn’t be, pining for an Iran I have in my mind and heart, brimming with real, flesh and blood people who I love so much, my heart wants to burst.

There it goes again: a heart of fury, a heart of love. I just can’t make it be a heart that I can make hamdel with those who made this moment possible. I feel I never can, even if the threat to erase an entire country does not come to pass. I was wrong about Israel attacking Iran in June 2025 and the ongoing US/Israeli war on Iran. Maybe I’m wrong about my ability to forgive too.

Everything I just wrote was an excuse for what is below:

I recently found a note I had written in my senior year in high school in Los Angeles. I wrote it 10 months after we had immigrated in late 1988. It’s a literature log. It ends in this way:

“My first day at school clearly showed me the change that had occurred in my life. I came from I [sic] school with strict regulations, where everyone knew me, to a place where students would apply make up in class. I also didn’t have any friends. Today, although I have become a bit accustomed to this life, I cannot still accept this change that has occurred in my life.”

Last night was a really bad night of bombing in Iran. In Tehran, it felt like bombs were falling all over the city. The country’s premiere science and engineering university, Sharif, was bombed. I kept thinking of the time a relative found out I got into MIT and told me: So what? I went to Sharif university.” I don’t remember that as a dig or an insult. I just keep thinking of the pride in his voice.

Today on my telegram account, I received a note from someone in Iran whom I don’t know personally but who had contacted me through mutual friends. He sent me two pieces, one written by himself and one by a friend of his. He told me he had been lucky to be able to connect to just send me these texts if I wanted to translate them and publish them on my substack. “If the texts need editing…I’d be very happy [for you to edit them.] You don’t need to check with me because I really don’t know when I can connect again.”

In reading and re-reading them, in translating their words, I was struck by the unvarnished ways in which they lay bare the fear and the horror of living under both uncertainty and bombs. The ways in which these beautifully expressed experiences reverberate past Iran and exist throughout the region. I have also not been able to stop thinking about my own memories of the Iran-Iraq war, memories that some would say I have repressed but I would say are conveniently tucked away.

For today, I have translated Zahra’s piece as she begins her text with the anxiety of the the US president’s 48 hour threat. It needs no framing and no explanation.1

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. I invite you to read them and incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics. And as ceasefires are proposed and rejected, and threats to bomb Iran into the stone age hang heavily in the Iran, I hope you distribute Zahra’s words as widely as possible.

Tehran, Sunday April 4, 2026 by Zahra

I am writing this text while President Trump has said that within the next 48 hours our country will no longer exist, will be destroyed, and I am suspended between this sentence and these 48 hours; neither fully in the present nor in a future that has been threatened. It is as if time has left its linear form and turned into something sticky and stretched that neither moves forward nor stops. To be honest, writing in this situation is impossible; it is as if words have broken down, as if they no longer have the capacity to carry meaning. Words that were always a refuge for me have now themselves become defenceless; they cannot hold anything, cannot frame the world or even make it slightly bearable. When we do not know what will happen to us in the next 48 hours, what exactly are words supposed to describe? What are they supposed to narrate? Where can they begin when every beginning might be an end?

My first encounter with war was long before I understood what war was. I was a four- or five-year-old girl, about 22 years ago, sitting next to my father while the television was showing images of children in Gaza, images that I later realized have never stopped, we just sometimes look away from them so we can live. I asked my dad, “Will they ever attack us?” And he, with a certainty that I now understand was not of certitude but care, said, “No dear, they can’t; Iran is strong.” And with that single sentence I calmed down, so much so that I took a deep breath, put my head next to my dad’s pillow, and fell asleep. That night, security for me was not a defense system or a political equation; it was just one sentence, a short sentence that could keep the world in place and preserve the boundary between sleep and nightmare.

My second encounter with war was at the age of seven, on a trip that was supposed to simply be a trip, not a rehearsal for loss: Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia, the Mediterranean Sea. Syria was beautiful to me, not like a postcard but in the sense of clinging to life so strongly that I did not want to return. After that we were supposed to go to Beirut; everything was ready—the visa, the plan, the excitement—but suddenly news came that Israel had attacked Lebanon, and the trip in a moment shifted from the horizon of possibility to the horizon of danger; the world changed from something to see into something to avoid. I asked my dad the same question again, and he gave the same answer again, and for the second time the world became bearable with a single sentence. Now that I think about it, my childhood was built on an unwritten contract: the world is dangerous, but father says no it’s not.

In this text I am not going to write anything except my own relationship with war. I’m not going to give complex analyses, nor present theoretical positions, just one big “NO:” no to war, no to imperial powers, no to everything that empties life of livability. But this “NO” when it comes out of experience, no longer resembles a sentence; it is more like a tremor, something that passes through language and stays in the body, like a shockwave that, even after the explosion has ended, still continues in the ear.

As I grew older, I understood that we, the inhabitants of West Asia, are not immune from the great evil of the region—the great evil and its allies, or the allies of its allies—a network of power that decides from afar and collapses things up close. But despite this understanding, war had not yet fallen onto my life. Its shadow was there but not itself, and like many of us I had learned to live with this distance, distance that is not so far that you remain unaware, and not so close that it knocks you down. Occasionally, to ease my conscience, I would tweet about the children of Gaza, the people of Syria and Lebanon, the women of Afghanistan, and I thought this level of action was enough. Four ineffective words in a world where a Palestinian child is shot in a food line or an Afghan woman is banned from school. In between strolling among Tehran’s cafes, having my skincare routine, working, and reading intellectual books, I would post a tweet, as if some unwritten balance sheet existed between their suffering and my everyday life. But I now understand that was not balance but suspension, a suspension that collapses with the first strike.

The summer of 1404 (2025) was no longer about the shadow of war; it was war itself: direct, immediate, without any time to prepare, frightening and shocking, like encountering something you always knew existed but never believed would reach you. I had studied sociology and thought I should be able to understand such a situation, but understanding did not help at all; knowledge lay useless beside me, and I could not even move my hands.

It lasted 12 days, and in those 12 days I understood that time in war is no longer calendar time. A day of war is not 24 hours; a day of war can equal a month of ordinary life, perhaps even more, because in war every moment stretches, fills up, becomes heavy, and then settles onto the body. I had always wondered what kind of a war was Lebanon’s 33 day war. Only 33 days? And those 12 days showed me that even one day is too much, far too much, in a way that can permanently change your definition of “a day.”

During that war, when our neighborhood was targeted, I heard a sound that before I only knew of in low-resolution versions in films. But the reality of that sound cannot be seen; it is something that passes through the ear and settles in the body, a sound that is not only heard but felt, like a rupture, like pressure, like a sudden collapse of balance. I developed a stutter for a few hours, as if language too, like the city, stopped functioning under attack. A large piece of shrapnel fell into our yard, where it could have landed on any of us. That war counted as my first war, and it was there that I thought of my mother and father, of the eight-year war with Iraq [from 1980-1988], of how they endured. My mother said at first we thought it would be one week, then it became one month, then one year, and then we saw it had become eight years. This sentence for me was not just a narrative of the past; it was an image of the future, a future where war can stretch itself, make room, remain, and even become normal. And this normalization is perhaps the most frightening part.

After those 12 days, I lived every day with the fear of another war. I clung tightly to life—very tightly—as if it might be lost at any moment and if I loosened my grip it would collapse. I thought I should be grateful for moments when bombs did not fall, a kind of forced gratitude for the absence of catastrophe. Others said I had become more resilient and kinder, and I jokingly said the doctor had increased my medication dosage, and they laughed, thinking this too was part of the post-war package. But those laughs were more like a way of not seeing what they did not want to see: that sometimes, to endure, a person steps back a little from themselves.

On Friday, the day before this war started, I was sitting in a café with my dear companion. He had bought me miniature peach-colored roses. I looked at the flowers and told him I was afraid of war; everyone said there would be war next week. He took my hand, his warm hands taking away some of the cold in my body, and the very next day the war began. It is as if fear sometimes arrives before reality, but this time there was no distance between them; fear and reality overlapped.

I was sitting at my desk at work when I heard the first explosion, and in that moment I understood that “before” and “after” are separated precisely at a single sound. I cried the entire way home. In the metro, people were each in their own world. I argued with a woman who was happy about “Trump’s liberating bombs.” I could not understand how someone could think of something called liberation in the midst of these sounds, in the midst of this fear. Liberation for whom and from what? When I got home, I could not stop crying. The war had truly begun, and nothing was like before anymore, not even me.

My mother said, “During the eight-year war I had to search for my brother’s body. Pull yourself together.” But I couldn’t because what needed to be pulled together no longer had its previous form. They had struck a hospital, a school with 180 students. How can one pull themselves together in such a world? On the seventh day of the war, they struck the same place again, as if war too remembers and returns to wounded places. I woke up screaming, thinking they had hit our house. I did not dare open my door, because opening it could mean seeing something I could not unsee. I just screamed. My father said, “Don’t be afraid, it’s nothing,” my mother brought sugar water [to increase blood pressure and prevent fainting], and at that very moment the second explosion occurred. I saw with my own eyes how the balcony moved back and forth, like it was something alive and reaction to the strike. The blast wave hit my left ear; I could not hear for a few hours, and then the sounds returned, but they were no longer like before, as if something inside them had broken. From that night on, sleep did not come. My ear would not allow it, the same ear that had now learned to distinguish the sounds of drones, missiles, air defense systems, and fighter jets from each other. These are not words that should be part of a person’s everyday vocabulary but have become so. I even searched on Google for the difference between cruise and ballistic missiles, as if knowledge, even if useless, could create an illusion of control when no control exists.

My ear still hurts. The doctor said there is no specific treatment for blast waves. Sometimes it produces the sound of the sea, and, this is the strangest part: that war plants a sound in the body that resembles nature, like the sea, as if the body tries to translate violence into something more bearable. But the most devastating event was none of these. It was the night of Nowruz [March 18]. After three weeks, I had finally managed to pull myself together a little, get out of bed, and not cry for a few days. I set the Haft-Seen table, thinking one must defend life in any way possible, even by arranging a few symbolic signs. But the world had no intention of honoring this. In the middle of the night, I woke up to a sound unlike previous explosions unlike anything familiar, a sound as if it came from within the walls, as if the house itself was collapsing. For a few seconds, I didn’t know where I was. My heart was pounding, and my body froze. Even the clonazepam did nothing; fear knew its own way.

We moved toward the window (or perhaps were pulled toward it) and nothing was like what it had been. The windows had not shattered; they had turned to powder, into dust, like a mist of sharp fragments suspended in the air. The house across from us was no longer a “house”; it was a collapsed mass, a black cavity in the alley, as if a piece of the world had been torn out and taken away. The walls had opened, the rooms had lost their modesty, people’s lives stood exposed like a revealed secret: a bed left half-intact, a curtain still moving, a closet left open, as if someone was still going to return and take their clothes.

The smell of burning and dust had mixed together, a smell that cannot be described and cannot be forgotten, a smell that clings to the throat, the skin, the memory. The sounds were fragmented: screams that did not complete, names called halfway, and silences louder than the sounds themselves. I can only say it was terrifying, but even that word falls short—very short.

Debris, debris, debris. Not as a word, but as reality. Layer upon layer, heavy, merciless. Twelve people were killed, sixteen units completely destroyed, but numbers show nothing. I saw a woman running with a hyacinth flower in her hand [Iranians put hyacinths on their new year spread], holding it tightly, as if were she to let it go, she too would collapse, as if that flower was the last witness of something called life just hours before.

They could not find Radin, a seven-year-old child whose bed had been by the window. The neighbors said he had bought blue sneakers for Nowruz. This sentence is like a nail in my head: “blue sneakers.” They searched for him for nine hours. These nine hours have no relation to ordinary time; nine stretched, exhausting, merciless hours. The rescue dogs were tired, the emergency workers lay down on the asphalt, as if their bodies could no longer continue. And in the end, only part of his body was found. No longer a child, no longer life, just “a part.”

Our alley was no longer an alley. It was a scene of what is left from the end of the world. It was not that its beauty had been destroyed; it was as if it had never existed. The walls were black, the air heavy, and the shattered glass underfoot made a sound like walking on something that should never have been broken.

And from that day, I became another person. This is not an exaggeration; I truly was no longer the one who arranged sabzeh and senjed on the table [two common items for Nowrouz spread]. My tongue would fail, tears would not let me go. I thought of the well-known proverb: “A good year is evident from its spring,” and I changed its continuation: “A good year is not ours, my friend.” It is as if even proverbs must adapt themselves to war. At the same time, involuntarily, I remembered the sentence that a bad life cannot be lived well, and we, the inhabitants of this geography, are caught in the heart of this contradiction: we must live in conditions where living itself has become a problem. And they do not let us live.

The veins under my eyes bulged, my ear throbbed. I thought to myself how did people during the world wars endure without these sedative pills? What does it mean that the doctor says there is no higher dose? Has no special medication been invented for wartime conditions? My body does not understand what war means. The body wants to sleep, to eat, to be calm, but war disrupts this rhythm; it destroys it from within. Thirty-seven days have passed. I have experienced severe bleeding twice. My body is protesting in its own language. My friend said this body is not made for war; it should relax on the beaches of Switzerland. I do not know if Switzerland has beaches or not, but my ear still produces the sound of the sea, as if my body creates another geography for itself, somewhere far from here. One month and one week has passed—37 days—but these 37 days are not just a number; they are an accumulation of something immeasurable, layered on top of each other like debris.

So many people have been killed, so many homes destroyed that I no longer know what to say. Building is so hard. Once I made a clay bowl, and when it broke I was sad for days. Now I think about all these bridges, hospitals, universities, petrochemical plants. Are they going to be rebuilt? And if they are rebuilt, will what has been lost return? Oh my precious homeland.

I want an ordinary life: metro, crowds, complaining about work, seeing my dear companion, evening fatigue, that ordinary fatigue that is a sign of being alive, not of exhaustion. But the city I live in is full of signs of war, like Khuzestan [southern oil-rich province and a major battle site during the Iran-Iraq war] where traces of the eight-year war still remain. When will these traces be erased, or will they ever be erased?

I have been laid off from work. When I started The Thibaults [a multi-volume French novel for which Roger Martin du Gard won a Nobel prize in 1937], I prayed the war would end. Now I am reading its second volume and hope I do not reach the third and fourth ones, because every volume I move on to means the war has also continued. I asked my mother why didn’t we have the sound of wind before? She said there was wind, but there were no fighter jets. And this simple sentence containes the entire difference between two worlds: a world where sounds are natural and a world where sounds are signs of threat. And now, among all these sounds, among all this accumulated experience, in a body that still trembles and a mind that is always anticipating, only one question remains, a question that has no answer and not even a fixed form:

What will the next 48 hours be like?

The extent and nature of the US/Israeli attacks have made the divisions between the pro and anti war segments of Iranian society feel like a chasm that cannot be bridged.1 BBC Persian recently released a video of testimonials highlighting how attitudes towards the war had wrought tensions inside families. One man noted that this division had led him to stay away from his family around the time of Nowrouz, the single most important holiday in Iran.

As more scholars, thinkers, and writers inside Iran connect to the internet using incredibly expensive proxy configurations, we’ve seen more engagement with these questions. For them, the domestic support for war is not just an intellectual puzzle but at the heart of Iran’s future once the bombs stop falling. The puzzle starts at one word: istisal.

As I’ve written elsewhere, istisal translates into desperation or helplessness though in its current usage in Iran, the meaning is far more layered and comprehensive. It was the predominant way that people described their dire conditions leading up to the December/January protests, and then their sense of grief and despair after the government killed thousands of protestors after Jan. 8. It has now become the focal point for understanding pro-war sentiments in Iran in the lead up, and into, the war.

For today’s weekend read, I have connected two texts. In the first, posted by the sociologist and researcher, Dr. Hesam Salamat on his instagram and Telegram channels, istisal is framed as a political issue that has “penetrated to the very marrow of each of us.” His use and conceptualization of it is based within discussions of the ongoing war, but is pulling from its pre-war connotations.2

That pre-war connotation is reflected in the second piece, a newspaper article from Payam-e Ma, published on February 22, 2026, titled “Society in the Vortex of Istisal.” The issues laid out in this piece from 6 days before the war have only been exacerbated. In thinking about the long term effects of this war, we should also consider how it has destroyed, I hope temporarily, non-violent solutions to Iran’s deep and systemic problems.

Because istisal is now a concept that carries a specific historical, social, economic, and political connotation, I have left it untranslated but feel free to think: desperation or helplessness every time you read it below.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

“War Meditation 3” by Hesam Salamat, April 1, 2026

The justification of this war in the minds of those who considered it a political option for freedom, and likely still do, became possible through a kind of “proxy agency:” “There is nothing we can do. But ‘they’ can. The people no longer have agency. But ‘they’ can have agency. What ‘we the people’ cannot do, ‘they’ will do for us.” In short: “We cannot, but ‘they’ can.”

This mental justification emerged from the experience of istisal, from the experience of powerlessness, incapacity, and ineffectiveness. The issue of istisal today is a political issue. Overcoming istisal and reclaiming the capacities and agency of the people is equally a political matter. But the problem cannot be solved with a simple “we can.” The experience of istisal has penetrated to the very marrow of each of us in different ways for each person. All of us have lived the reality of istisal. All the “it didn’t work,” “we failed,” “we were left behind,” “we reached a dead end,” and “we couldn’t” have been lived through again and again to their fullest extent, and have become part of our collective memory as “memories of istisal.”

We need an immensely widespread movement, the birth of a passionate collective spirit, precisely in this moment of decay and death, one that, through mobilizing all these wounded bodies, troubled souls, and denied lives, calls for reclaiming the people’s capacities and power. The rising of Iran from the depths of its present exhaustion and breathlessness depends on the will for freedom. It is the uprising of a “nation” to rediscover its “self.”

“Society in the Vortex of Istisal,” by Yasir Mokhtari in Payam-e Ma newspaper, 4 Esfand 1404 (February 22, 2026).

These days, Iranian society has entered a kind of “social istisal.” This condition, which had existed in various forms for a long time, has intensified with the events of Dey 1404. This situation brings a kind of inaction, despair, and social isolation that can lead to citizens’ indifference toward the condition of the country and society.

Social istisal is a state in which a large segment of society feels it has lost the ability to influence its own destiny, and that individual or collective efforts do not lead to improvement. The roots of the concept of social istisal lie in the theory of “learned istisal,” first introduced by the American psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1960s. He showed that when individuals repeatedly face uncontrollable situations, they gradually come to believe they have no control over outcomes and give up trying. Later, sociologists extended this idea to the collective level and used it to explain feelings of powerlessness and istisal on a social scale.

Istisal is closely related to the idea of “social anomie” from Émile Durkheim, in which weakened norms and institutional distrust intensify feelings of powerlessness. Robert Merton also shows that the gap between social goals and the means to achieve them can lead to collective istisal. The consequences of this condition include reduced civic participation, increased social indifference, and erosion of social capital.

In recent years, numerous studies have addressed issues related to social istisal. Some research conducted since 2017 has reported findings such as alienation, despair, distrust, and feelings of istisal among social groups. For example, the study “Hope and Hopelessness in Iranian Society: A Case Study of Students at Tehran Universities,” published in 2023 in the journal Iranian Cultural Research, reported a lack of collective hope and a tendency toward migration. Another study titled “Structural Challenges and Social Anomie in Iran,” published on the ninth of Dey this year in ASA Degisi, using the concept of anomie, shows that the weakening of shared norms, structural inequalities, and the gap between social expectations and economic realities have led to increased public distrust and a sense of collective powerlessness in Iran; a situation that can reduce social participation and erode social cohesion.

The simultaneity of structural crises

Hossein Imani Jajarmi, a sociologist, in an interview with Payam-e Ma about the causes of the emergence and intensification of this current social istisal, considers the starting point of his analysis to be simultaneous attention to major economic, social, and political variables. He says: “Iranian society in recent years has faced the simultaneous occurrence of several structural crises: economic stagnation or very low growth, widespread unemployment—especially among the young and educated—chronic inflation, continuous decline in purchasing power, and the effects of sanctions. The combination of these conditions has made daily life difficult for a large portion of the population and has taken away the possibility of long-term planning from individuals, households, and institutions.”

He emphasizes: “When people cannot predict their economic future and do not see a clear prospect for improvement, the feeling of uncertainty gradually turns into a collective experience.”

According to this sociologist, the absence of a clear economic outlook is largely tied to ongoing international restrictions and the shadow of sanctions: “In such an environment, even domestic policies are less able to create hope for rapid improvement, and this contributes to the formation of a kind of general perception of ‘deadlock.’ This perception is not merely subjective, but rooted in people’s everyday lived experience.”

He goes on to point to the political dimension of this istisal and says: “Low participation in the presidential election two years ago and increasing dissatisfaction with the performance of executive institutions are signs of weakened social capital and public trust. When citizens feel that promises are not fulfilled and that there is no effective mechanism to influence major decisions, the gap between society and the power structure widens. This gap manifests itself in distrust, withdrawal from political participation, and a sense of individual ineffectiveness.”

Imani considers the generational gap to be one of the key factors intensifying this situation and explains: “The new generation has grown up with a different lived experience: broad access to social media and the free flow of information, smaller families, apartment living, and weakened traditional extended family ties have all created different expectations and values. This generation wants to be heard and to participate more in determining its own fate. Formal mechanisms have not yet fully adapted to these changes. The result of this mismatch is a sense of exclusion and deadlock among part of the youth.”

Consequences of living in a state of istisal

A faculty member at the University of Tehran, referring to the psychological and social consequences of living in a state of istisal and suspension, says: “A society cannot live for long with chronic anxiety and a sense of insecurity without this condition affecting individual and collective behavior. The increase in certain risky behaviors, the decline of social hope, and the erosion of trust-based relationships are among the likely consequences of such conditions. When this experience becomes shared among millions, it can no longer be explained merely through individual solutions or psychological counseling; it must be elevated to the level of the ‘collective spirit’ and social conscience.”

Referring to protest events in recent years, he describes the overall trend of developments as concerning and says: “Since the late 2000s, each wave of protest has been accompanied by higher levels of tension and violence. One of the main reasons for this trend is the weakness of formal channels for expressing demands and for effective dialogue between society and the government. Additionally, the limited circulation of political elites and the restricted participation of various social groups in decision-making processes have led parts of society to feel excluded from the sphere of politics.”

According to this sociologist, many current issues are tied to political decisions, while these decisions are often made without broad participation and public dialogue: “The way out of this cycle is a serious reconsideration of the concepts of participation, citizenship, and the distribution of power. The more people are involved in managing public affairs, the more rational, transparent, and aligned with public interests decisions will be, and consequently, social commitment to those decisions will increase.”

Regarding how to repair the gap between people and the state, he explains: “Criticism of current policies does not necessarily mean indifference toward the country’s fate. Many citizens may disagree with certain policies yet still feel a sense of belonging and responsibility toward their country. Even if political agreements or economic improvements occur in the future, repairing the trust gap requires a conscious and long-term plan.”

Strengthening civil institutions and expanding social dialogue

Imani recalls the experience of other countries in overcoming similar situations and says: “Societies that have faced deep political divides have usually managed to rebuild trust through strengthening civil institutions, expanding social dialogue, and using governance knowledge.”

In his view, governance is a specialized field that requires the use of scientific and expert capacities along with broad citizen participation, in such a way that no group feels excluded and everyone considers themselves part of the collective destiny.

Referring to studies on quality of life, he notes: “Iranian society, in periods when it has benefited from stronger expert management and more constructive interaction with the world, has shown progress in human development indicators. This experience shows that improving quality of life and increasing social satisfaction is possible, provided that policies are oriented toward public welfare, reducing inequalities, and making effective use of domestic and international capacities.”

This sociologist emphasizes: “There is no simple or immediate solution to the current situation. However, initiating a broad social dialogue can be an important step. Yet the polarization of society and the weakness of civil platforms have made this dialogue difficult and have pushed many into silence. Nevertheless, overcoming the sense of collective istisal will not be possible without strengthening civil institutions, expanding real citizen participation, and gradually rebuilding social trust. This is a time-consuming process, but only through it can the shadow of uncertainty be reduced and a more stable outlook for the future be created.”

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The text for today was sent to me by Dr. Roya Khoshnevis, a Tehran-based cultural analyst and researcher, specializing in Petroculture Studies with a focus on the Persian Gulf. In it she provides a rarely seen glimpse into the everyday experience of living within the Islamic Republic of Iran’s war propaganda machine.

Over the past decades, Iran has built a sophisticated propaganda system aimed both at its own citizens and the outside world. In the past month, even as people in Iran have struggled to find ways to move past the internet shutdown (mainly through costly and unstable proxy configurations), the Islamic Republic has been steadily putting out videos highlighting its war efforts. Most notably, a number of sleek AI generated videos that cast the US, Israel, and Iran as Lego figures have gone viral (see below for links.)

As Dr. Khoshnevis shows, the propaganda directed at the Iranian public is unfolding across domestic social media platforms (limited to users with an Iranian cell phone number), as well as on streets, billboards, and television screens. All of this is happening in the context of fractured public opinion about the war and deep social divisions. Her piece captures what it feels like to live in the middle of an information war, where truth is uncertain and the consequences are likely to extend far beyond the war itself.

This post is part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses from inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely. My deepest gratitude to Dr. Khoshnevis for sending me her insightful analysis and agreeing to its publication here.

“Sweet Lies and Bitter Truths”: Iran’s Propaganda War

by Roya Khoshnevis1

My friends and I often joke in our group chat on Iranian social media that some people seem to work for Iran International, others for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting [IRIB]; some for Mossad, and others for Iran’s intelligence agencies. Depending on which outlets people follow and share, they are quickly categorized and divided into opposing camps. Yet this division goes beyond difference of opinion. It has reached a point where people are dying for holding even slightly different views.

One month into the war, both sides present themselves as the victors of this brutal conflict. Each highlights its own offensive attacks, while emphasizing its defensive strength. As a result, we find ourselves trapped between “sweet lies and bitter truths” in an ongoing propaganda war.

The Iranian government calls this war the “Ramadan War.” In doing so, it has rapidly linked the conflict to Shiite belief systems particularly concepts that portray believers as soldiers of the Imamate [leadership of the community of believers after the death of the Prophet Mohammad]. This framing helps explain a notable shift in public presence over just two months: streets that were once filled with broadly pro-war participants are now increasingly occupied by explicitly pro-regime supporters.

The physical absence of Mojtaba [Khamenei], referred to as the third leader of the Islamic Republic, and his reliance on written statements without images or voice recordings,2 echo deeply rooted Shiite beliefs about the “Hidden Imam” [Imam zaman in Persian, the promised Messiah in Shi’a Islam]: an absent figure who will return at the appointed moment. Mojtaba’s anticipated reappearance, zuhur mikonad (“he will appear”), is frequently framed in messianic terms.

This cultivated absence has only deepened public confusion. His image appears across cities on billboards, portraying him as a composed, pious, and restrained leader who will emerge at the “right time.” In religious narratives, this moment coincides with a world overwhelmed by injustice, after which the [hidden] leader returns to restore order. Such a conception of time offers spiritual meaning to those who believe that resisting evil creates the conditions for the manifestation of a just leader and will bring about a form of justice long deferred in Shiism, primarily since the martyrdom of the third imam, Husayn ibn Ali in the battle of Karbala.3

With commercial advertising largely suspended during wartime, and amid attempts to shift symbolic leadership from Reza Pahlavi, who is called the “leader of television” to Mojtaba as the “leader of the people,” cities, roads, and alleyways are now filled with minimalist images of the younger leader. These images are accompanied by a single poetic line:

دست خدا عیان شد / خامنه‌ای جوان شد

The hand of God became visible / Khamenei became young

By emphasizing his age, a sense of renewed energy is injected into what we can call the new Iranian mode of resistance. The elimination of senior figures within the Islamic Republic has also coincided with the rise of a younger, more active, and technologically attuned cadre. At the same time, rumors about the death of this “young leader” and members of his family have circulated widely. Whether true or not, such narratives have significantly shaped public perception in recent weeks. As during the Iran–Iraq War, the current conflict is framed symbolically as resistance against illegitimate [literally “false”] global powers.

This propaganda war is also unfolding through new communication platforms. On domestic social media applications such as Bale4, numerous posts depict Iran as the clear victor while portraying the U.S. military as the loser. These platforms function similarly to Instagram, with channels and pages distributing curated narratives. In one such channel, “Akhbar-e Enfejari” (“Explosive News”), I encountered a short animated video titled Come Closer.5

In the animation, characters appear as Lego figures. Donald Trump is depicted as exhausted with a bandaged hand, uncertain of his next move in the Persian Gulf. Kharg Island is reimagined as a futuristic hub resembling a new UAE, complete with advanced infrastructure, modern oil facilities, and urban development. The animation portrays Iranian forces launching attacks from Kharg toward U.S.-aligned positions in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Missiles carry symbolic coffins labeled “For Loser.” The video concludes with a distant view of Kharg Island beneath the Iranian flag, accompanied by the phrase: “Come Closer.” [You can watch the video here.]

Beyond Iran’s domestic platforms, alternative media activity is heavily restricted, and its use often deemed illegal.

In recent news, Dr. [Javad] Ramazan-nejad, head of SATRA [Iranian Mass Media Regulatory Authority Organization responsible for issuing permits], addressed controversies surrounding domestic streaming productions, stating: “No consideration outweighs my professional judgment. Under wartime conditions, I will not allow content unrelated to the war to be released in the country under the guise of entertaining people or even in the name of unity or some such things.”6

In line with this emphasis on wartime production, Iran’s state broadcasting has begun developing a scripted television series titled Ahl-e Iran (“The Iranians”), focusing on ordinary citizens who are portrayed as devout Muslims and patriotic figures in the midst of the “Ramadan War.”7 Its symbolism recalls cultural productions of the 1980s, the first decade after the revolution and during the war with Iraq. The series prominently features the Iranian national flag, even suggesting that there’s now a scarcity due to high public demand, particularly for use in state-encouraged evening street gatherings aimed at reinforcing unity among pro-regime supporters.

Although the series has not yet aired, its trailer evokes aspects of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. As Negar Mottahedeh argues in the book Displaced Allegories, such works exist in a space between reality and fiction. For those living in Iran today—experiencing bombardment while witnessing nightly displays of what might be called “the other side” of Iran’s reality—this blurred boundary cannot be denied.

Long lines of cars move through city streets, many carrying the national flag and expressing support for Iran’s military actions against the United States and Israel. Yet, like many narratives produced both inside and outside the country, these representations often erase other segments of Iranian society. This is why many believe that even if the war comes to an end, the internal divisions among Iranians will persist for years to come.

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Ali Abdi is an Iranian anthropologist and political activist known for his involvement in student movements and his writings on social and political issues, including gender and minority rights. He gained prominence as a student activist during the 2009 Green Movement.

After leaving Iran, Abdi pursued doctoral studies in anthropology at Yale University in the United States, where his academic work focused on gender dynamics and marginalized communities. He returned to Iran in 2023, where he was later arrested and sentenced to a total of 12 years in prison “for articles he wrote a decade ago about gender and sexual minorities, 5 years for protesting the announced results of the 2009 election and 1 year for ‘propaganda against the regime’ during those years.”

The text is translated by Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at University of Chicago. It is produced as part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses published inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

Beyond the Binary

by Ali Abdi, March 26, 2026

(1)

We are in the first days of Farvardin [third week of March and the start of the Iranian new year.] I have come to Tehran to buy a book. It feels apocalyptic: the streets are dark and lifeless; the sky is cloudy and smoke-filled; the pedestrians are in sorrow and disarray.

A few bookstores are open around Meydan-e Enqelab [in English commonly known as Enqelab Square though it’s a roundabout.] But even here, there is a sharp smell of sulfur. Someone gestures with his hand, pointing at a location he says they have bombarded in the south. A black plume of smoke rises to the sky seemingly from Shahr-e Rey.

On Keshavarz Boulevard, I see several men dressed in black and armed with Kalashnikovs. They have handcuffed a few people to the railings in front of a building. They shine flashlights into the detainees’ eyes and interrogate them.

The atmosphere is heavy and fearful. One of the men in black comes up behind me and tells me that I will be detained if I don’t walk faster.1

There is no sign of the usual bustle in Laleh Park. The food vendors along the boulevard are gone; the park market and kiosks are closed; and there are no signs of Tehran’s famous cats in the darkness.

In Meydan-e Vali Asr [in English commonly known as Vali Asr Square], about a thousand people have gathered with Iranian flags. A large television screen stands on one side of the roundabout, playing Mohsen Chavoshi’s “Hasbi Allah.”2 A eulogist chants praise for the courage of the first and third Imams of Shia Muslims and the resistance of Iranian fighters. The people chant along with him.

A man steps onto the platform and speaks of one of his friends who had been behind a missile launcher and lost both hands in the hospital. He speaks of another friend: “He was martyred last night. The martyr’s son was born just a few hours ago.”

Most of those present in Vali Asr are women. I see at least two women who are not wearing hijab.

For twenty-seven days now, Iran has been under bombardment by the wicked forces of the world. For more than forty years, Netanyahu had wanted to bomb Iran. The director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center [Joe Kent] wrote in his resignation letter last week that the Israeli lobby dragged Trump into this war.3

One hundred thousand residential and commercial units across Iran have been damaged to this day. Three hundred medical and emergency units have been destroyed or rendered inoperative. Five thousand compatriots have lost their lives. Millions in Iran (and Gaza and Lebanon) have been displaced from their homes. And the environmental, psychological, and economic damages of the war will only emerge later.

Netanyahu and Trump are embodiments of human wickedness in the contemporary world: racist, deceitful, greedy, child-killing, child-abusing. Their ultimate goal is to weaken Iran under the banner of “fighting the Islamic Republic.”

Israel opposed a strong Iran even before the 1979 Revolution. America’s inhuman sanctions have been imposed on the Iranian people for fifty years, regardless of which government has been in power. It was the U.S. government, not Iran, that tore up the nuclear deal in front of the cameras.

(2)

We are in the days before the war. In Isfahan, I speak with a friend I met through cycling in the city. He had been arrested on the 18th of Dey [January 8, 2026 referencing the bloody Iranian crackdown on protestors] and spent a month in Dastgerd Prison [i.e the Isfahan Central Prison].

He says two of his cellmates were brothers in their twenties. The younger brother had asthma. Their mother went to the judge several times, saying her son needed medication. The judge did not agree to the mother’s request for the medicine to be delivered. The younger brother grew weaker each day in prison, but the authorities paid no attention. Eventually, in the final week of his detention, he lost consciousness in the crowded and stressful environment of the prison. The authorities took him to the hospital. The next night, news came that he had died in the hospital. My friend spoke of the dust of mourning scattered through Dastgerd Prison after the news.

I go to a hospital in Isfahan for my father’s surgery. There, I meet another acquaintance who has come for his wife’s treatment. He tells me about his sister and brother-in-law who were crossing the street on the 19th of Dey [January 9, 2026] when the brother-in-law was shot and killed in front of his wife’s eyes.

The acquaintance says that for nine days, the authorities did not release the body to the family. They gave the family two options: either pay a significant sum to retrieve the body or sign a document stating that the deceased had been a supporter of the government and a martyr. In the end, the boy’s mother agreed to sign the document under psychological pressure. The acquaintance says that his sister still has difficulty speaking.

(3)

The media — from Iran International to state broadcasting — generally construct binary narratives; that is, they portray two groups of Iranians in opposition to one another so that a story of truth versus falsity takes shape and each side comes to see the other as an enemy: pro-/anti-government, pro-/anti-war, religious/non-religious, and so on.

These binaries, however, are simplifications of a complex social reality. Most of Iran’s population probably does not belong to either end of the spectrum.

A free-minded Iranian opposes oppression. It makes no difference whether the oppressor is foreign or domestic, whether oppression is carried out in the name of religion or in the name of human rights. A free-minded Iranian opposes discrimination. It makes no difference whether that discrimination comes from a racist European or from a prison guard, whether it is the result of colonialism or authoritarianism.

A mother whose son, a soldier, was killed behind a missile launcher and a mother whose son was killed on the 19th of Dey both experience similar suffering as human beings. A soldier who lost both hands behind an air defense system and a protesting farmer from Isfahan who lost his eyes to pellet shots are both deserving of empathy and care.

The families who spent [the Iranian] New Year’s [day] at martyrs’ cemeteries share common experiences with the families of those killed in the Ukrainian airplane tragedy.4 Kian Pirfalak5 and the girls of Minab6 are equally deserving of attention and mourning.

Our collective well-being depends on bringing these ordinary people closer together. The Iranian phoenix takes flight through their coming together.

This closeness is only possible if we become familiar with the lived experiences of others. Familiarity requires listening to the other. Listening is an act of selflessness. Selflessness does not arise from anger and resentment.

For Iranian society to pass through this crisis without falling victim to the violence of people against people, there is no path except connecting with those ordinary others—stepping out of our epistemic caves, leaving behind our self-made tribes, and walking toward those who possess a different worldview but share in our humanity, Iranianness (and Muslimness).

The truth is that the beginning of this path lies within us before it connects to anything outside of us.

(4)

These days, when Red Crescent rescue workers pull someone from beneath the rubble, they do not ask about their political or religious beliefs. Their service is inclusive, selfless, without discrimination, effective, directed toward preserving the lives of all Iranians.

These are some of the best practical examples we have for breaking down conventional binaries.

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Something in me broke and for the last 4 weeks, I’ve been trying to both understand it and put it back together. Here are some of its pieces.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how years ago, at an informal meeting of some students and scholars of the Middle East, a woman turned to me with real fear in her eyes and said: What do you have to say about the culture of death in Iran? I was taken aback: No one had asked me that question before and so I didn’t think I had much to say. “Which culture of death exactly do you mean?” I asked trying not to sound flippant. “You know,” she retorted, “the one they teach Iranian children in schools.”

That scene from long ago keeps turning in my head. For us to get here, to get to a war with no objectives, no purpose, no reason, and seemingly no end, a lot of things in both short and long term needed to happen. For years in meetings, briefings, in classrooms and conversations with various policy people and journalists, I thought I had done everything right: I had listened to them present a distorted view of Iran, I met them where they were, and I had engaged with their certitudes, as ridiculous as they were, all in an attempt to be heard, to get them to at least acknowledge that perhaps reality was a bit different than what they thought, and in doing so create a tiny tear in their own desire to rain death on Iran in the name of…whatever was de jour that day.

I had failed, now I see, so abjectly.

I had done this “engagement” with people who could barely acknowledge the humanity of so many Iranians at a cost to myself. The cost I now realize was to my own feelings, my own sense of belonging. I had macheted my own self in two: the clear-headed analyst and the person who yearned, yearned and desired to go back to…what? Home? Maybe not back but go to a place where belonging felt organic, felt rooted in the soil.

When you miss someone or something in Persian you say دلم برات پر پر می زنه, my heart flutters for you. I wish my heart would just beat. This fluttering is killing me.

In these past 4 weeks, journalists call and want you to provide local flavor: Tell me about how it felt to walk in Isfahan. Tell me about the last time you walked along the joobs of Tehran. I haven’t been back in 20 years, I tell them, trying hard not to roll my eyes. I’m not the right address for this.

The last time I walked in the city I was born in was 2006. The next year, I went to India for the summer. The year after Egypt. The year after Syria. I was a citizen of the world and Iran…well it was going to be there as it had been all my life. Then 2009 happened and as I followed it by going to internet cafes all over Damascus, glued to Twitter, I never once thought that this was it. That the door was forever shut in my face.

Why I never went back to Iran after that is a story for another time. But as the years rolled by, the realization set in that slowly but surely, I had slipped from being an immigrant to being in exile and I hated that. Growing up in Los Angeles where those who had fled the revolution in 1979 and after beat their chests for their “vatan” and froze emotionally and mentally in the moment that they had left Iran made me hypersensitive to that. After we immigrated to the US in late 1988, I kept going back to Iran. Every time I arrived, conversations and relationships would pick up seamlessly from where we had left them off 9 months ago. Immigration didn’t feel like a rupture. It felt like just an addition to who I was. Friendships kept going, even flirtations and love and lust would play themselves out while I was there, and then pick up where they had been left off the next time I went back.

I was living inside a changing country and I was changing with it. The Iranians in LA and elsewhere in the US whose image of Iran had frozen with their departure felt strange and wrong to me. I would never want to be that.

To not be that, to not let unrequited desire for return turn me into a caricature, I took a machete and cut myself in half. I could not, I would not feel. I would only think. I would only analyze. I would try to understand Iran as an object of my expertise as an historian. I would not feel.

To do that, I stopped looking at images of Tehran. I did not want to see the snow-capped mountain in the background of buildings and highways and overpasses. I did not want to see the sycamores of Vali Asr, the water running in the joobs, or young and old sitting in cafes. I read the newspapers, the magazines, the books, and I tried to understand the country’s political, social, economic, and cultural evolution as it was, not as I wanted it to be, and through it all, I tried not to see it. I didn’t want my heart to flutter.

Then on February 28, the bombs started falling and haven’t stopped since. And I just realize now that the thing that broke in me was, to mix all of my metaphors cause honestly, I’m too tired to not mix them, the slowly constructed wall between who I am and who I want to be. That wall came tumbling down.

I’m very surprised by all of this. I know, without a single doubt in my heart, that I’m not an Iranian nationalist. I do not believe in Iranian exceptionalism. When at times a sense of pride or just amazement creeps into me about the fact that so many Iranians over the past decades have kept coming into the streets demanding political, social, and economic freedom, I brush it off. I remind myself that so have others and I just might not know about it. When I feel crushed by the sight of bombs falling on city after city after city after city, when I am overwhelmed by anxiety when I hear the sound of explosions and then, as a child of war in the 1980s, feel the tremors of concrete falling in my body, I remind myself that even at that moment, people in other parts of the region are experiencing something akin to that. I’m not special. Nor are Iranians.

Yet. Yet why does this hurt so intimately? And why can’t I bottle up my heartbreak and throw it in the sea?

In the past 4 weeks strange things have happened. I find that all I want to do is speak Persian. Because of the fact that my family went back and forth between the US and Iran in the 70s, I have been bilingual since I was 4. I dream in fact only in English. But these days, I find myself searching for normal everyday words in English. My brain is flooded with the only language I knew for the first 4 years of my life. Sometimes when I’m sitting in class or at a dinner party, I become conscious of the strange music of English coming out of my mouth and into my ears. It’s not that it feels alien. It’s that it makes me miss Iran; it makes me want to cry. I have no other way of explaining it.

In finding and translating writers, thinkers, and journalists inside Iran, I have entered into strangely intimate relationships with people I have never met, and quite possibly never will meet. I contact them, formally introducing myself in Persian. They inevitably write back with “Naghmeh joon,” dear Naghmeh, as if we’ve been friends for decades, as if we have shared memories. They use their expensive and rare moments of connection to the internet to send short messages that end with “تصدقت” or “قربانت” or “دمت گرم” untranslatable expressions that literally mean “may I sacrifice myself to you” or “may your breath continue to be warm.” These translations feel so wrong. They’re feelings and emotions of sincerity, gratitude, and an intimacy born of intense crises. They’re commonly used public expressions that feel so private to me.

These past 4 weeks have been strange. They feel futile. They feel incomprehensible. They feel like they shouldn’t be. They feel endless. Every day, I tell myself, today no more tears. But every day I also tell myself you cannot let this feel normal. You cannot let it be ordinary. I’m so worried I will forget as the war drags on. I’m so worried I’ll go back to being two halves instead of this one heartbroken self.

***

p.s. Some days ago posted this poem. If you ever wondered what the point of poetry is, here you are: It says in few words fully what took me 1500 words to say incompletely.

Meditations in an Emergency
by Cameron Awkward-Rich

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

According to the independent news agency HRANA, by March 25, 2026, the Iranian civilian toll of this war has reached 1,464 people (including at least 217 children), military fatalities at 1,167 people with 669 fatalities unclassified (i.e. unclear if civilian or military.) They also report that “the Israeli Minister of Defense, regarding the country’s operations against Iran, stated that so far, more than 15,000 bombs have been dropped on Iran. This number is four times the amount used in the 12-day war.”

Meanwhile Iran is still in an internet shutdown, with those who want to connect having to jump through many hoops, and/or paying a high cost to break through the Islamic Republic of Iran’s communications shutdown using black market methods.

Yesterday, the economist Dr. Mohammad Maljoo was able to post multiple pieces on his telegram account, one of which used talk of ceasefire to “call for rethinking the concept of ‘resilience’,” a term often used by the Islamic Republic to celebrate Iran’s ability to withstand US and Israeli bombings and attacks. Maljoo’s rethinking expands the horizon past the short term and looks at the medium and longer term ways in which the war is undoubtedly going to reshape the structure of Iran’s fragile economy.

What follows is Dr Leila Faghfouri Azar’s translation of the text. Dr Faghfouri Azar is a Lecturer and Research Fellow in Legal Theory at the University of Amsterdam. The translation is produced as part of a collaborative effort to engage with perspectives and analyses published inside Iran. I invite you to read them, incorporate them into your understanding of Iranian politics, and help distribute them widely.

Today’s war, tomorrow’s inflation

If the ceasefire decision is left to the military alone, it will inevitably be based on a narrow, short-term view of reality. From a military perspective, only two main factors stand out: military resilience against attack and social resilience to war damages. What remains overshadowed are deeper economic and institutional dynamics, which not only shape the capacity to sustain war today but also the quality of peace in the postwar future.

The problem is not merely that war damages the economy. War reshapes the structure of the economy as well. Iran’s economy, which is already confronted by structural constraints, war intensifies a vicious cycle: reduced production, rising public spending, and a weakening capacity for social reproduction1. This cycle stems not just from physical destruction but also reflects disrupted expectations, chronic uncertainty, and accelerated capital flight.

In such a situation, the government’s budget becomes the main site of the emergence of crisis. On the one hand, war and support spending surge sharply. On the other hand, the pillars of government revenue, including taxes and exports, shrink and become more volatile. This gap pushes the government towards ever more costly forms of finance: borrowing from the central bank, squeezing the banking system, or using future resources in advance. The result is a far sharper rise in liquidity than before and, as a consequence, inflation at levels not seen in Iran’s modern history.

Yet inflation does not remain only an outcome of this process; it becomes a mechanism that reproduces this very crisis. High inflation in the years ahead will push the economy deeper into a self-reinforcing cycle of instability.

This setting calls for rethinking the concept of “resilience.” Resilience is not just the ability to endure pressure now. It also refers to a society’s capacity to absorb shocks and rebuild itself over the medium and long term horizons. A society that endures war in the short run but then faces destabilising inflation, collapsing purchasing power, and rising uncertainty cannot claim sustained resilience. It has only delayed the crisis.

This picture reveals a key analytical gap in military decision-making: a mismatch in time horizons. Battlefield success or failure is usually judged in the short term, whereas economic consequences, particularly inflation, emerge later and over the medium term. This may invite a strategic mistake: prolonging war on the basis of immediate signals while overlooking the main costs that still lie ahead.

Deciding on a ceasefire should therefore be seen as a question of “intertemporal optimisation:”2 a decision that requires balancing the costs of continuing the war against the economic and social costs that follow. This means that ending the war should not hinge solely on current military attrition. It must also weigh the risk that the economy may cross critical and irreversible thresholds after the war.

From this vantage point, a ceasefire does not remain a mere military move. It is a political and economic choice with profound distributional effects. It determines how, when, and on whose shoulders the costs of war will fall.

Therefore, involving economists, social policymakers, and representatives of diverse social groups in this process is not merely ornamental, but a necessary condition for making a decision that determines the timing of a ceasefire not only on the basis of military and social resilience, but also on society’s capabilities for viable postwar futures.