The Left is failing Iran
An essay by the Marquis
If one city ever did its utmost to avail the literature of the Umayyad period of its somewhat dismal reputation, it is Kufa; it is here, this garrison town, from which the Muslims launched their invasion of Persia, that the rhetoric of the early Islamic period emerged in its most severe, its most precise, in its most manly, almost Roman, form - so far-removed from the wine-breathed panegyrics of serial-belchers like the poet Al-Akhtal. It is from Kufa’s pulpit that we hear governor Ziyad ibn Abihi’s inaugural ‘speech without a preface’ to his new subjects, so named for his forgoing of the conventional opening pleasantries toward God and His Prophet:
‘Ye are putting kin before religion, ye are excusing and sheltering your criminals, and tearing down the protecting laws sanctified by Islam; beware the arbitrary summons of relationship [...] Hatred towards myself I do not punish, but only crime. Many who are terrified at my coming will be glad of my presence, and many who are building their hopes upon it will be undeceived. [...] From you I demand obedience, and ye can demand from me justice. In whatsoever I fall short three things there are in which I shall not be lacking: I shall pay your pensions at the proper time, and I shall not send you to war too far away or keep you in the field overlong. [...] Do not let yourselves be carried away by your wrath against me; it would go ill with you if ye did. Many heads do I see tottering; let each man see to it that his own remains on his shoulders.’
How modern, how strikingly lucid those lines would have seemed to an audience more familiar with the ever-flowing, ever-tedious stock phrases of Sassanian regal speech (“I am the King of the Empire of the Iranians, Ahuramazda bestowed the earth upon me,” and so on and so on) should be counted among the most crystalline expressions of all that is most attractive in Islam. And from from the same pulpit, from among Ziyad’s successors, the Umayyad governor Al-Hajjaj, do we hear:
“By God, I take full accounting of wickedness, match it in return, and pay it back in kind. I see heads ripe and ready for harvest, blood foaming between the turbans and the beards. [...] By God, I do not make promises without fulfilling them, and I do not measure without cutting. [...] By God, you will stay on the straight paths of the right, or else I will leave every man of you preoccupied with the state of his body.”
And it is here too that Caliph Umar, fresh from his early victories over the Sassanians, but now hesitating at the banks of the Euphrates, tells us, ‘I wish there were between us and the men of Persia a mountain of fire, through which they cannot reach us, nor we them.’ Such sentiments will have been shared by the more irritable residents of North Finchley last Saturday, watching the Iranian diaspora’s honking motorcades tear through that unseasonably mild February night. A little further south, toward Kilburn and the Edgware Road, similar scenes were witnessed just over a year ago, when the Syrians celebrated the overthrow of the Ba’athist government.
But where the Syrians were celebrating a coup that by then was already a fait accompli, at time of writing, the Iranians are celebrating what has not yet amounted to more than the bombing of their own country, while the path to regime change remains unclear, and notably absent from the White House’s stated aims. This might strike us as totally inexplicable without an understanding of the mindset of the middle-class Pahlavist Persian diaspora. By their account, as anyone who has spoken to the crowds in Trafalgar Square gathered for the various ‘Woman Life Freedom’ protests over the last few years can attest, Iran possesses a more mature, more modern, almost European-adjacent culture (note the number of French loan words in common usage in Farsi - not only for modern concepts like ‘airport,’ or ‘neurosurgery,’ but even for things for which the native language would perfectly suffice: ‘mersī,’ for ‘thank you,’ ‘rāndevū,’ ‘fāmīl’) than their Middle-Eastern neighbours, and a foreign-backed regime change would more closely resemble the case of post-war Germany or Japan than it would present day Libya or Afghanistan - this is the undertone of the now cliche genre of videos circulating on social media, showcasing women in university lecture halls or wearing bikinis to the beach in pre-revolutionary Iran.
In some sense we should find their pride admirable. But it does not erase the fact that, at present, the liberal reformers will not have an armed wing on the ground unless the US-Israel alliance provides one, which appears they will not, while much more sinister Jihadist and Baloch separatist groups the regime keeps at bay, like the PFF, Ansar Al-Furqan, and ISIS-Khorassan - all equally disinterested in seeing the miniskirt make its long-awaited return to the streets of Tehran - do. But let us not be glib; if the Persian diaspora are overconfident in the possibility of democratic reform, and willfully naive to the dangers that may lie in the coming months and years, it is out of a very deep felt love of country that makes their present exile all the more tragic.
A brief aside on the Persian Jews in particular, who make up a good portion of the Iranian diaspora in London and with whom I have some personal familiarity. While for most of the Jewish community in Britain, the fact that one’s grandparents were once in some sense Polish, or Lithuanian, or Ukrainian, or whatnot, is only a half-remembered piece of family trivia, the Mizrahis, like the German Jewish emigres of the mid-20th Century, understand themselves as meaningfully belonging to the country they have left behind. They want their children to know Farsi because between themselves and the Iranians there is nigh on 3,000 years of symbiosis that the revolution of 1979 has not undone. They do not call themselves ‘British Jews,’ and have not plonked themselves down on the Gogglebox couch with the rest of the country, between David Baddiel and Steven Fry - for this they deserve some credit.
They and their countrymen, both in Iran and abroad, have suffered much and have their own dead to bury, and would have perfectly understandable reasons to find it trite and unfair to hear a foreigner say that when I saw the portrait of 14-month-old Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani, granddaughter to Ayatollah Khamenei, who was murdered last Sunday by US-Israeli forces, my eyes bulged and my mouth went dry and my heart lurched into the wrong part of my chest until my boss asked me to do something and I had to compose myself.
I find the term ‘Epsteinite,’ now in vogue among certain sections of both the Left and the ‘America First’ Right to describe the American and Israeli establishment, vulgar and facile, in no small part because it appears to be downstream of Haz al-Din. But there is some grain of truth in it; should the advocates of regime change get their way, the future for Iran’s young women looks bleak.
With Iran finally opened up to the West, its economy destroyed, its political situation unstable, and its national assets in oil and gas sold off to foreigners, girls of Zahra’s age may well grow up in a world not dissimilar to that of Eastern Europe’s ‘Wild Nineties;’ their classmates and older sisters will disappear for ‘modelling contracts’ in Dubai or New York, and reappear in smut videos or lazily half-buried in the long grass of the Sandringham Estate. ‘Persian girl’ will take on roughly the same associations ‘Latvian girl’ did in British sit-coms of the 2000s: as a punchline to bawdy jokes about mail-order brides and cheap prostitutes. A word-search for the terms ‘Polish’ or ‘Lithuanian’ in Epstein’s emails will give an all-too vivid picture of what I am describing. If this sounds hyperbolic, know that the same happened to the women of Syria and Iraq, and there is every reason to fear that the videos of scantily clad Persian Los Angelinas dancing around with the Pahlavist flag, currently being bookmarked by oinking war hawks on Twitter, will be looked back on as a grim portent of things to come.
One effect of what Trump has been able to prove in his second term, that the US can pursue an interventionist foreign policy while keeping the deaths of its own servicemen in the single digits, is that to debate these matters can now be treated as above the pay grade of the civilian population. Following the messaging from the White House, one does not sense in Pete Hegseth’s addresses - given in a string of HBO-drama-esque “clippable moments,” as if imagining his own words being turned into TikTok edits as he speaks them - any need to justify the intervention in Iran on its own merits: the war is justified because we have won it already. Foreign policy decisions have been elevated to some higher plane which public feeling does not reach, and to butt in is, as Keir would say, “moaning from the sidelines.”
In the face of this, the anti-war left appears to have gone limp. Jon Stewart, who, for all he and the readers of J’accuse are likely to disagree on, can be given some credit for his fierce opposition to the Iraq War, is now making the kind of snarky, tasteless jokes about the Khamenei’s ‘72 virgins in Heaven’ that were once the purview of GOP talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Even self-described ‘anti-imperialist’ Mamdani apparently only felt able to denounce the war on the grounds that Americans do not want it - duly followed up with as thorough a condemnation of Iran’s government as Ted Cruz could’ve wished for. The US bombing that preceded his press conference by some days, ending the lives of over a hundred Iranian primary school girls - the kind of thing the anti-war left of the Bush years would not have let us turn away from - did not warrant a mention.
Are we to take from this that the American Left, its more radical discontents notwithstanding, are indeed satisfied that all will turn out for the best? Who has given them this confidence? Who puts themselves forward to save the youth of Iran from civil war, poverty and immiseration? Serial podcast guest and all-round light entertainment legend, Reza Pahlavi. Before we dismiss him out of hand, let us give him his due and turn our attention to his Emergency Phase Booklet, published last month, which outlines his plans for the transition of power; since I cannot reproduce it in full, we will skip, out of curiosity, ahead to the passages inexplicably concerning Brexit. Here we see the masterful, cultivated prose of a man who has spent every moment of his 50 year exile sharpening his resolve, polishing his wit, preparing to one day steer the ship of state:
The research conducted for this white paper suggests that Britain’s legal experience during the Brexit transition is the most analogous and thus the most relevant example for Iran. [Note that, in the preceding paragraphs, this example has been chosen over that of the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Egyptian Revolution of 2011] Britain’s departure from the European Union has led to significant changes in British laws [sic]—a process that is stillongoing. Estimates suggest that more than 50,000 British laws were related to the EU. One might question the relevance of Brexit to this discussion [Indeed we might Reza!] especially given that it did not even involve a change in Britain’s system of government. [...] The transitional period designed by British lawmakers could serve as an important source of inspiration for us [...] when Brexit took effect in 2020, a transitional period of approximately one year was implemented to prevent legal chaos. [Italics my own.]
As this tantalising little excerpt suggests, the Emergency Phase Pamphlet is entirely substance-less. Amusingly, a running theme is that its authors will often invent a useless, self-serious piece of jargon to describe something totally mundane, and, mere paragraphs later, seemingly forget that ideas as salient as “The ‘Promising’ Criteria” are in fact its own half-baked inventions and not well-established notions in political philosophy. That this document is so rushed and ill conceived (let us remember, the Shah’s own advisors counselled him to pass over a then 20 year old Reza - always, as has been said of Tony Blair, “a bit of a smoothie” - in the chain of succession, in favour of his apparently already more intelligent 13 year old brother) should come as no surprise. What should shock us, however, is that it took until February 2026 for such a document to emerge.
Reza Pahlavi is a man who quite obviously would have been happy to make a comfortable living from a series of speaking engagements in Washington DC and LA, and now unexpectedly finds himself pressured to “do something” by dint of circumstances entirely beyond his control. It was the Iran of Reza’s father of which Martin Ennals, then Secretary General of Amnesty International, said ‘no country in the world has a worse record in human rights’ - in many ways a far more authoritarian, murderous and corrupt regime than today’s. It was no more a democracy then than it is now, and he should be told very firmly to stay home and keep his not-quite-proverbial beak out. Reza more closely resembles a post-coalition Nick Clegg, swanning around San Francisco giving motivational speeches to Facebook executives, than he does Napoleon on St. Helena. It is heartbreaking to think that, in Iran, there are young people who have been brutalised in prison cells that smell like bleach for chanting the name of a man who, the same day the bodies of 153 Iranian school girls were being dragged from the rubble, took to Twitter to wish his condolences to the handful of US pilots who died in the attack.
Ultimately it will fall to them, and not Reza, to rebuild their country in the wake of what will continue to be inflicted upon them in the weeks to come. Iran has suffered greater injustices in the last few decades than the petty things - the denial of one’s freedom to wear a bikini or walk a dog in public - that British and American observers tend to obsess over, which the youth of that country have every reason to leap at this opportunity to redress. As to what that should look like I have no idea. But, writing from a country that has not yet found the strength to overthrow its own malingering, decrepit monarchy, we should hope for their sake that, at such a decisive moment in their history, they do not let theirs come slithering back.