My thoughts on Iran's situation as we wait for the internet blackout to end

As some of you know, in my last post I said I just couldn’t write here anymore. My plan was to find another venue that felt better than here to me. I also really wondered if I wanted to write and share. But to be quite banal: Life is unpredictable and now Iran, the place I have spent a lifetime studying, is going through something extraordinary. I have to write because…I guess that’s what I do. Or rather, it’s how I force myself to remember. If you are not following what is happening, I recommend you do even if Iran or the Middle East is not your jam.

A quick summary: On December 28, 2025 protests broke out in various Iranian towns and cities over the flat out dire economic situation people are in. The downward slide of the currency against the dollar became a full-on plunge into an abyss. This time around, it was the shopkeepers who protested first, then as ever, students followed. It got bigger, more sustained. The son of Iran’s deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi, who seems to have gotten himself a far more competent political team than in previous moments of crises did what he has done before: Called for everyone to come out into the streets on Thursday Jan 8, 2026 and Friday Jan 9 at 8 pm Tehran time. Last time, when bombs were falling on people’s heads in June 2025, his call to end the Islamic Republic fell on dead ears. This time, the country exploded.

Between the 12-day war and now, the situation in Iran has become so bad that “dire” as a word seems insufficient. The word Iranians keep using for their condition is istisal استیصال, which translates into desperation but is more like a compilation of all its definitions into one feeling: a pulling of roots, deracination, a sense of no hope, no ability, and a sense of being destroyed. It helped that this time around, Pahlavi called for demonstrations when people were already protesting. It also helped that it fell on the anniversary of Iran’s IRGC shooting down Ukraine International flight 752 after mistakenly identifying it as a US missile. All the passengers were killed. It remains a wound that will not close.

Since last night there’s been an internet blackout in Iran. As I’ve written before, these internet blackouts make you feel like a chicken with its head cutoff. (See: https://truethings.naghmehs.com/p/you-ok)

The silence of WhatsApp and Telegram, the two main platforms with which we outside of Iran communicate with those inside, when the government cuts off Iranians from the world, is eerie. All night I kept waking up and checking to see if there were any messages. So far, none.

I spent yesterday on WhatsApp arguing and talking to friends. They were holding their breaths wondering if the call to demonstrate would be answered by throngs of people. I went back and forth with them on whether it makes any logical or human sense to see Reza Pahlavi as a leader, the monarchy as a replacement for the Islamic Republic. The most common refrain is: We just want these guys out and there’s no one else ready to lead. “Naghmeh, why isn’t there anyone else?” one asked. The reason I realized was the reason why the ex-monarch’s son eventually became the perfect lighting rod. The Islamic Republic had systematically shut down any and all voices of opposition inside Iran. Over the past decades, it had undone its own safety valve whereby people felt some hope, some tiny little hope but hope nonetheless, that there were avenues for gradual change. And outside Iran…my flippant answer is that most of us had to work for a living. Makes sense that a 60 something year old man who’s never held a job but has a lot of resources and instant name recognition would be ready to pounce. But that’s just me being snarky. (Though not entirely wrong.)

“You don’t live here; you don’t understand how desperate things are.” I get it, I said. I do. But if I can’t analyze the situation because I’m not there, why can the Crown Prince rule the country when he’s lived in Iran even less than I have? I retorted, my high school debate training kicking in vulgarly.

Back and forth. Voice texts after voice texts. Sorry, I finally say. I know you don’t need me to add to the tension. No, someone says, this is good. We have too much nervous energy. This argument helps us get it out.

Finally, I get an answer that I can’t shake: I don’t care about democracy right now. I don’t care about even freedom of speech right now. Give me a dictatorship that lets me pick my own clothes, drink if I want to. Give us personal freedoms and an economy that runs. I just want these guys out.

Like so many others, I watch blurry nighttime videos of people all over the country wanting these guys out. This is a march. It is a protest in every way imaginable, its shape sometimes a line, sometimes a circle, most of the times a fractal both arbitrary and patterned. I’m struck in some of the videos by how the protestors are walking on the sidewalk and not in the street, which remain full of cars. I’m struck by the lack of placards and signs. A friend jokes that you need your hands to take videos in the digital age, not hold a sign. I laugh. But I know there’s something else there; a teeming population that didn’t even pause to make a sign. Their bodies and their voices enough for now to say what they have to say. They shout freedom, they shout death to the dictator, they shout things I can’t understand. They clap, they scream. They shout long live the king to the same rhythm that almost 47 years ago their compatriots shouted death to the king. In one video, the traffic lights are just changing to yellow: green is yellow, red is yellow. I replay it and replay it until it seems to me that the yellow is dancing to the rhythm of the people’s clapping.

Right before the country disappeared under the darkness of an internet shutdown, I get a voicemail. I can barely hear her voice against the sound of a street boiling over with people. I can hear footsteps, chants, conversations floating by her. I hear chants of Long Live the King. Then I hear my friend’s voice, happy, breathless: “I don’t know if you can hear me but it’s so exciting here. It’s happening!”