Mahsa Amini protests exposed the failures of Iranian regime and its opposition
The following is an excerpt from my recently published book, Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World (Haymarket, 2025):
Following the death in police custody of Mahsa Zhina Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, on 16 September 2022, in Tehran, a nationwide social uprising erupted under the potent slogan "Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" (Woman, Life, Freedom).
Led primarily by women and girls, it became one of the most revolutionary moments in contemporary Iranian history.
Before long, a gang of expat charlatans - mostly clustered around the discredited, pro-Israel Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed and fugitive last Pahlavi monarch - sought to hijack that uprising for their own nefarious purposes.
The dignity of the Zhina uprising was threatened not only by the ruling regime in Iran but, even more insidiously, by Pahlavi, Masih Alinejad, and their ilk.
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In the wake of the Zhina uprising, I began writing a detailed account of the events, situating them within the broader historical arc of two centuries of democratic uprisings in Iran and the wider region.
My purpose in writing this book remains twofold: first, to wrest the Zhina uprising from the wicked claws of expat monarchists and US-sponsored regime-changers; and second, to locate it firmly within the historic forces that have shaped the paradoxical revolutionary aspirations of a decidedly post-democratic world.
Revolutionary journey
I began my academic career in the late 1970s mesmerised by the Iranian Revolution of 1977–1979. Decades later, I published a book on the Arab revolutions of 2009.
That trajectory covers almost half a century of reflecting on the point or use or lasting consequences of all these revolutions, not just in Iran or the Arab and Muslim worlds, but the French in the 18th century, the Russian in the 20th, the Chinese, the Cuban, the Algerian revolutions that have very much defined the terms of our critical thinking on massive social uprisings.
What have we achieved, what have we lost, where do we stand now, decades and generations after so many uprisings and so many upheavals?
What have we achieved, what have we lost, where do we stand now, decades and generations after so many uprisings and so many upheavals - what constitutes the success of revolutions and in what terms do we measure their failures?
From one end of the Arab and Muslim world to the other, our societies and polities are ruled by military juntas, unelected monarchs, fake and flimsy claims on "democracy", and above all, millions of defiant people tired of their failed attempts at democratic representations.
All of these reflections percolated in the autumn of 2022 when my homeland was once again revolting against an Islamic Republic that has ruled it for now nearly half a century.
Was this one among countless other uprisings, soon to be brutally suppressed? Or was it a "real" revolution? To topple the ruling regime and bring to power what exactly - the expat monarchists, the cultic Mujaheddin-e Khalq organisation, the militant "secularists", as they call themselves, the regime changers funded by an assortment of reactionary venues operating within the US government? And to achieve precisely what? Democracy, rule of law, economic and social justice?
Is it possible to entertain such ideals and aspirations any longer, this far into the 21st century? I had no doubt about the legitimacy and the justice of the massive uprising in Iran, but how could we trust in meaningful reform internal to the recalcitrant Islamic Republic, or in the assortment of proto-fascist monarchists, secularists, or US-allied promoted regime changers who were clamouring to succeed it?
I had just started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia when the Iranian Revolution of 1977–1979 began. The American diplomatic corps was taken hostage in Tehran between November 1979 and January 1981. Along with thousands of other Iranian students, I was stranded in the US and could not go back to Iran to continue my participation in the Iranian Revolution, on which I was planning to write my doctoral dissertation.
Therefore, I changed the subject of my dissertation and wrote about an entirely theoretical and distant historical event. With Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads (1989), I sought to figure out the internal dynamics of the inaugural moment of a world religion that has repeatedly haunted history, always with a vengeance.
But I could not stay away from the revolution. In my Theology of Disconnect: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993), I spent a decade producing a detailed account of the Iranian revolution of 1977–1979.
Failed promises
When I published one of my most recent books, The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (2020), I was completely convinced that the entire colonially manufactured unit of the "nation-state" and the democracies that are supposed to govern them have run their courses and have no institutional legitimacy anymore - reduced to the dead skeleton of a colonial relic existing to torment people rather than help ease their lives, a source of their economic deprivation and political destitution rather than a mechanism for social welfare.
The myth of the postcolonial state, I thought, had long since lost its mystique. But the obvious question had remained - if the unit of "the nation-state" is epistemically exhausted and useless, as is the mirage of democracy, then what? Where do we go from here?
If the momentum we see in Iran of 2022 has indeed a revolutionary potential, what end is it gearing towards - a better state, a more democratic and representative polity? How could we, in the age of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, and Jair Bolsonaro, or closer to home, the geopolitics of Khamenei, Sisi, Erdogan and Assad, still sustain any hope in the prospect of a successful revolution or a representative democracy?
I began to follow closely the events in Iran in the autumn of 2022 while asking myself where, if anywhere, is a model for democracy? Russians don't live in a democracy, neither do the Chinese, nor the North Koreans, nor do they have any claim to be democratic. What do Americans have that the Chinese and the Russians don't? Freedom, they say?
Democracy was and remains in crisis - not just in places like Iran or Egypt or Syria that have never experienced it, but even at the very presumed heart of white people's historical claims to it: in Europe and the US
Freedom to do what? To elect Donald Trump, a white supremacist, Evangelical Zionist zealot as their proto-fascist president - who turned around and used and abused the very institutions that brought him to power to stage a violent electoral coup?
What do the people of countries like Egypt, Iran, or Turkey want then - proceed with their democratic struggles so one day they can elect an Egyptian or Turkish or Iranian Trump? Or Biden? Why would any decent human being want to have anything to do with that prospect?
I was not, of course, alone in raising such serious questions. In a small volume published more than a decade ago, leading European and American philosophers and political theorists - Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristian Ross, and Slavoj Zizek - asked similar questions and shared similar anxieties.
Democracy was and remains in crisis - not just in places like Iran or Egypt or Syria that have never experienced it, but even at the very presumed heart of white people's historical claims to it: in Europe and the United States. If not for a prospect of democracy in a world that lacks any legitimate example of it, then for what are these uprisings all dressed up and ready to go? Where exactly? There is pain, discontent, corruption, tyranny, abuse - all over the world, and Iran has more than its share of them.
Beyond democracy
But how are we going to address these issues and who will address them? The lacklustre son of the deposed and deceased Shah of Iran and his coterie of proto-fascist royalists, the leader of a cultic organisation codenamed MEK, good-for-nothing hacks funded by the US and its regional allies?
What, then, is or could be the alternative? There is no alternative, I concluded. The delusion of democracy was a colonial concoction (a world capitalist ruse) that is now exposed for what it is and over and done with - we've hit a wall with pictures of Trump, Modi, Assad, Sisi, Ayatollah Khamenei, Putin, and the rest of them plastered all over it. This is the case unless, like Hannah Arendt, we make a crucial distinction between freedom from tyranny and liberty to choose a different political system.
At this point in history, I have therefore concluded, we are far more invested in freedom from tyranny than harbouring any conviction or trust in liberty to choose a legitimate alternative state. I am now convinced we are far better off understanding what has tormented us and despising it than hoping to achieve what we wish and has historically escaped us.
But we need to make a crucial amendment to Arendt's position here. This is what she says in On Revolution: "If the ultimate end of revolution was freedom and the constitution of a public space where freedom could appear, the constitutio libertatis, then the elementary republics of the wards, the only tangible place where everyone could be free, actually were the end of the great republic whose chief purpose in domestic affairs should have been to provide the people with such places of freedom and to protect them..."
What will happen, then, if we altogether give up on such active delusions of attainable democracy - and simply dwell in the moment of freedom from tyranny? A miracle: we are all liberated from the delusion of democracy and stop being implicated in the spectacle of political careerists pretending they will give it to us.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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