Bloodied by Israel, Iran turns to ancient Persia for strength

After an existential crisis the regime is newly pragmatic, using past glories to unify the nation and relaxing morality rules — but dissent will not be tolerated

By Catherine Philp, Tehran

Crowds gathered in Revolution Square, waiting for the black curtains to fall. Unveiled women, dressed in jeans and crop tops, held hands with boyfriends alongside others dressed in the all-enveloping chador.

As the music mounted, the veil fell to reveal a statue never seen before in post-revolutionary Iran: the Roman emperor Valerian bowing in submission before the ancient Persian king Shapur. A slogan flashed up on surrounding screens: “Kneel before the Iranians.”

If Iran’s 12-day war with Israel in June left it bloodied and battered, its nuclear programme badly damaged and an entire layer of military command wiped out, you would not know it from events like this, staged in the centre of Tehran.

Iran has long cast itself as the leader of transnational resistance, standing up on behalf of the Islamic world against an aggressive West. What is new — and still highly controversial — is reaching back in time for national heroes from Iran’s pre-Islamic past.

Taybeh Edrisi, 38, a history professor, came with her girlfriends to see the Shapur statue unveiled. “It’s a good idea to unite the people with the government,” said Edrisi, who wore the black chador of the conservatively religious. “I believe patriotism and religion are equal, but today patriotism is more important.”

Iran’s long history and the glories of ancient Persian civilisations have long been a source of pride to its deeply patriotic people. Less so to its Islamic rulers, who frowned on nationalism as an imperialist import that the revolution had come to do away with.

“Islam is opposed to nationalism,” Ayatollah Khomeini declared on taking power in 1979. “Nationalism means we want the nation, we want nationalism, and we don’t want Islam.”

Women routinely ignore the requirement to wear the hijab these days

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL

But soon after a ceasefire was declared with Israel, ending 12 days of bombardment, Iranians turned to their ancient past, in particular the relief of Shapur’s victory over Valerian, carved into the cliffs of Persepolis, using the imagery to craft memes depicting the Iranian people as victorious.

The event in Revolution Square was organised by Alireza Zakani, Tehran’s ultra-conservative mayor, a mark of how quickly the regime has cottoned on to the unifying power of the ancient kings. “Enmity with Great Iran can only end in kneeling before this historic nation,” Zakani wrote on social media. Only two months earlier, an official in Persepolis was arrested after attempting to organise a similar event.

Looser hijab rules a sign of pragmatism

Some came for the music, not history, provided by some of Iran’s top pop stars. “These are our favourite singers,” Mohammed Amin, 38, a businessman, said. “But we are not naive. We know the authorities are only staging events like this to distract us and alleviate the pressure from the people.”

Men and women dancing and singing together in a Tehran square would once have provoked a harsh crackdown from Iran’s morality police. But the existential crisis that the war with Israel has provoked has prompted a new, pragmatic approach by the regime, loosening the most visible social restrictions it puts on its people even while clamping down hard on political dissent and jailing journalists, activists and minorities on often spurious charges of spying or assisting the enemy.

Perhaps the most visible is the decision not to enforce the mandatory hijab and ignore an even harsher new chastity law passed by the hardline parliament, evidence of the tussle between conservatives and reformists over the future of the regime. In Qom, known as “the Vatican” of the clerical regime, mullahs are furiously finding justification for the flex without ever admitting that the previous rules may have been wrong.

Anti-American murals are visible in many parts of Tehran

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL

“It is very complicated,” said Hojjatoleslam Ranjbar, the director of Qom’s Baqir al-Olum University, which is close to the supreme leadership and provides advice on fatwas, legal rulings on Islamic law.

“The issue is how to manage these kinds of changes so that the outcome should be a society with more morality, more respect. And we are thinking about what to do for these kinds of changes. Some others are trying to make a division between Islam and democracy, but we believe they can come together.”

Fatemeh Mohajerani, the Iranian government spokeswoman, educated at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, insisted that the decision not to enforce the hijab did not represent a break with the past.“This was a decision that has been made by a whole government, or a state,” she said.

“During these 12 days of war, you even had a picture from a girl without the hijab saying that I will sacrifice myself for the supreme leader. It shows that we made the right and quick decision to not force people. Yeah, OK. So we believe that the hijab is about morality. It’s not something to push people to do.”

The streets of Tehran now look very different to the way they did before the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022, sparking the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in which more than 185 people were killed. Girls and women with flowing, uncovered hair meet in mixed groups in hipster cafés to study or even flirt.

The long ban on walking dogs is not enforced. The government is mulling officially allowing long-prohibited motorbike licences for women, while clerical disapproval has zoomed in on a new vogue for exposed midriffs.

Hardliners like Tehran’s Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice headquarters have hit back, vowing to replace the morality police with 80,000 trained volunteers to enforce the hijab. “I don’t think it will happen,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the ultra-conservative Kayhan newspaper and personal representative of the supreme leader, said.

“The supreme leader said imagine the youth are your own children. If they reject something, you should try harder to convince them. Give them a friendly reminder.” Many of those youth, however, insist there is no going back.

“I don’t think the government can control this generation any more,” Mozhde, a postgraduate student, said as she ate lunch in Tehran’s Cafe Godot with a male friend from her hometown in Zanjan province. “They have to change. It’s a real challenge for them.”

Political crackdown on Iranians ‘assisting the enemy’

There is no such grace for those accused of more serious infractions against the regime, such as spreading “false information” online or assisting the enemy. About 21,000 suspects were arrested under a “national security” crackdown related to the war.

They included members of Iran’s 9,000-strong Jewish community, arrested for contact with worried relatives in Israel.

They have since been released, after representations from Jewish leaders. Some have suffered antisemitic abuse, “but nothing on the scale you have seen in Europe,” Homayoun Sameh, the sole Jewish member of Iran’s legislature, said: “And these are from people who do not understand the difference between Jews and Zionists.”

New legislation expanding the death penalty for espionage has prompted a surge in Iran’s execution rate, with an average of four people put to death each day.

Questions and discontent swirl over the fate of other regime opponents, such as Omid Sarlak, who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his car after filming himself burning a photograph of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

Hundreds of mourners attended Sarlak’s funeral this month after police claimed he died of suicide, chanting “Death to the dictator” and “Death to Khamenei”.

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former shah, called Sarlak a hero who stood against the “oppression of the Islamic Republic and sacrificed his life for Iran’s freedom”.

While most anti-regime protesters call for democracy rather than the restoration of the pre-revolutionary monarchy, Iran cracks down hard on any signs of popular affection towards its deposed royalty.

That has traditionally included the celebration of Iran’s pre-Islamic kings, most famously Cyrus the Great, on whom Iran’s shahs drew for their legitimacy.

In 1971, eight years before he was deposed, the shah held a lavish celebration of “2,500 years of Iranian kingship” at Cyrus’s birthplace at Pasargadae, which Khomeini denounced from exile for sacrilegiousness and excess, galvanising the revolutionary movement.

Since then, the regime has clamped down hard on any attempts to celebrate Cyrus at his birthplace and excluded him from the latest embrace of ancient Persian history.

“If they put up a statue of Cyrus, the whole of Tehran would be here,” Faik Faegh, 42, a Kurdish shopkeeper, said as he stood among the crowds in Revolution Square. Cyrus famously freed the Jews from the Babylonian captivity and helped them rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. “Cyrus could be like a bridge between Israel and Iran,” he noted.

The Times was accompanied throughout its visit to Iran by a translator from a government-approved agency, but translations were checked afterwards with an independent Farsi speaker. All the translations were accurate, and people spoke, sometimes in English, with remarkable candour, including criticisms of the regime. All interviews were at The Times’ request.

Iranians blame US and their own government for woes

Israel’s bombardment of Iran — and in particular the resulting civilian casualties — has turned even many previously sympathetic Iranians against the country. But many ordinary Iranians said it was President Trump they blamed, after he announced that Israel only acted after he gave his permission.

There is anger, too, at the sanctions Trump reimposed on Iran that have contributed to the economic malaise. And while some do not believe a nuclear programme is worth the cost, others bristle at the notion that outside powers have the right to tell Iran what it can do.

The war has put the question of nuclear negotiations on the back burner. Iran began indirect negotiations with the United States two months before Israel launched strikes against it, after Trump’s 60-day deadline for a deal passed without agreement. Iran viewed the strikes as a betrayal of the negotiation track.

They also bolstered the position of regime hardliners who had never wanted negotiations, while weakening the reformist government that advocated them. “Part of the government believed we should have negotiations, but the supreme leader did not,” Shariatmadari said.

“After this war, you have given a big gift to Iran, you have proved the supreme leader’s statements were correct.”

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Yadolah Marvati, 55, who sells the traditional sweet sohan along with souvenirs to pilgrims in Qom, expressed pride in Iran’s refusal to bend to the will of foreign powers. But he blamed President Pezeshkian and other reformists for the economic woes that Iran has faced over recent years. He moved to Qom after his small packaging factory was bankrupted by competition from cheap Chinese products.

“Pezeshkian is not educated enough to run the country,” he said. “We need someone more skilful, like Ahmadinejad”, the conservative nationalist whose disputed second election in 2009 plunged Iran into the most serious protests it had faced since the revolution. “Only he was a true Iranian; the others were following the West.”

The war had scared away the usual flow of religious tourists from neighbouring Iraq, a country battling for its independence from both the United States and Iran. It is another mark of the Islamic Republic’s growing isolation in the region after the fall of the client Assad regime in Syria and heavy blows suffered by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Its economic isolation has also deepened after the United Nations, Europe and the UK reimposed suspended sanctions due to Iran’s refusal to comply with restrictions on its nuclear programme.

Ali Reza, 60, used to export his intricate, handwoven Persian carpets all across the world. Sanctions have devastated the export trade, and now he relies on domestic customers paying only a fraction of the price he used to get in the global marketplace.

It was not foreign governments he blamed but a regime that refuses to respond to the will of its own people and benefits corruptly from the closed economy it controls under the sanctions regime.

“When a religious regime runs a country, it doesn’t serve the needs of the people,” Reza said. “The religious believe the origin of power comes from the sky, not the people.”

Change was afoot, however, he maintained. “We are in a transition now. It’s necessary after a system that has lasted 40 years. The young people don’t want to follow a way of life from 1,500 years ago. They know their rights.”

One stallholder, Hussein Malik, said he had been doing a roaring trade thanks to some of the recent changes coming from Iranian youth.

He was selling Halloween decorations despite an official prohibition, instituted for the first time this year, to counter the growing popularity of what is seen by clerics as a sign of western cultural invasion.

“Demand has been through the roof,” Malik said. “It’s only taken off in the last couple of years.”

A secret Halloween party at a friend’s house was one of the last gatherings Mozhde attended before she travels to Italy for her postgraduate studies.

“The young people want to make their own decisions about what they celebrate: religious, Iranian, western,” she said. “We will not just be told what to do any more.”