Iran on the Edge: Inside the Uprising the Regime Tried to Crush

Five leading Iranian writers reckon with a shattered uprising, a despotic regime and a country edging toward it's final season.

by Karl Vick

Editor at Large

The men who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran came to power in 1979 after millions of ordinary people filled the streets to demand the end of a despotic regime. Looking out their windows in the first days of 2026, they knew exactly what they were seeing on thoroughfares and boulevards.

They also knew how to clear them.

On Jan. 8, Iranian authorities shut down the internet and gave security forces their orders. What followed was one of the most intensive massacres by gunfire since World War II. Thousands were killed nationwide. Although the precise toll is difficult to verify, Iranian health officials tell TIME that the numbers could far exceed most estimates, with 30,000 people killed in 48 hours.

President Donald Trump had promised the U.S. would “come to the rescue”; it did not. The regime claimed victory. As January wound down, the President pointed toward the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier group and pressed the ayatollahs for “a deal.” Iranians counted the dead.

In the pages that follow, five Iranian writers assay the state of the country they long to return to. Known for most of its 2,600 years as Persia, it has been the Islamic Republic of Iran for less than half a century—a radical, catastrophic experiment in governance whose final hours will be determined by ordinary people now driven indoors by truck-mounted machine guns.

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is in free fall. And the despots quail. As one exiled journalist put it in 2022, the last time Iranians reclaimed public spaces: “I don’t know if this is the final episode of the Islamic Republic. But it’s the final season.”

The original version of this story misstated the area that officials in the Iranian Ministry of Health said had produced 30,000 deaths on Jan. 8 and 9. It was the whole of the country, not Tehran alone.

When I Think of Iran I Think of Light

by Azar Nafisi

When a friend asked Henry James how he endured the devastation of World War I, the writer replied, “Feel, feel, feel all you can.” His exhortation contains the essence of what it means to remain human. Totalitarian regimes try to dismantle our capacity to feel, render us numb, confiscate our humanity, the way censors black out passages in books.

When I think of Iran, I think of light. I think of the play of light on leaves, on water, on mountains. I was born in Tehran, and when I looked out of the window of my living room, I would look at Mount Damavand, our tallest mountain peak, covered with a halo of snow. I think of that. And I think of our poetry nights in Tehran. I think of the writer and editor Houshang Golshiri teaching us classical Iranian poets during our poetry nights. I think of reading Ferdowsi and Nizami in our living room and the living rooms of my friends.

In December, the Iranians rose up in protest. The Islamic Republic spoke its only language: violence. And again the morgues and graveyards of Iran received fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. For me, as for millions of Iranians, this struggle is not political. It is existential. The first thing the Islamic Republic did, like any totalitarian system, was take away our right to live. They did it by literally killing people. And they did it by trying to reshape the citizens, turn us into figments of their imagination, to create a new Iranian.

I was teaching in Tehran during the revolution in 1979. I didn’t know myself at the time.

The Islamic Republic made me understand a lot of things by taking them away. They were confiscating my history and my identity as a human being. They were depriving us of contact with the world, making us believe that nobody cared about us. I felt the isolation they imposed upon us was a trap we could only escape by feeling, living, and resisting. 

When I was leaving Tehran, my mother followed me around the apartment. “Tell them,” she kept saying, “tell them.” Tell the world what is happening to us. I had to write, as Primo Levi put it, “in order to rejoin the community of mankind.” 

Last night I could not sleep. I kept thinking of three people. The only way I can repay my debt to them is to keep them alive through their stories. So I will tell you of Dr. Farrokhru Parsa. She was the principal of my high school in Tehran. She was very strict. She would stand at our high school door, checking the length of our uniforms. We would make poems and stories about her. She became, along with my mother, one of the first six women to be elected to the Iranian parliament in 1964. She became the minister of education, changed the representation of women in school textbooks, and significantly advanced the education of girls and women in Iran.

The Islamic Republic came for her. They charged her with crimes from “propagating corruption and prostitution” to “violating Islamic morality.” A revolutionary tribunal in Tehran declared her a “corruptor on earth” and sentenced her to death in May 1980. The legend is that they put her in a sack because you are not supposed to touch a woman and killed her by shooting at the sack. Some say they just hanged her or stoned her. It was a time when I felt immense despair. Many Iranians quote, what is believed to be Dr. Parsa’s last message from her prison cell to her children: “I am not going to bow to those who expect me to express regret for fifty years of my efforts for equality between men and women. I am not prepared to wear the chador and step back in history.”

I stayed in Iran. And that brings to me my second story, my second person. He was my student at Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran, where I was teaching English literature during the war with Iraq. He had fought in the war and was very active in the Muslim Students Association, which worked as an instrument of ideological conformity and state control on campuses. He had the power to throw me out of the university. Or worse!

One day, as I was teaching Henry James, we heard this noise in the hall outside. Two students rushed in with the news: this young man had brought two cans of petrol with him, doused himself, and set himself on fire. “They have betrayed us,” he shouted. “They have betrayed us.” Some of my students made jokes when his body was being carried out. It made me very unhappy. I scolded them. “You don’t know what he has done,” a student retorted.

I realized there is another kind of death. The regime shapes us into its likeness, hardens the heart. I tried to convey that to my students through the teaching of the novel. A great novel is multi vocal and speaks on behalf of many. The novel threatens the lies of a totalitarian regime like the Islamic Republic. The novel nurtures curiosity and empathy.

My third story is about Razieh. I only remember her first name. In 1979, I was teaching contemporary American fiction at a small girls college in Tehran. Razieh was my student.

She was a practicing Muslim. Her mother was a cleaning lady. Her father was dead. She was a thin, small girl, with her veil framing her face. She was serious. I can see her face. Razieh would walk with me to the university gates and we would talk about Henry James and Jane Austen. She fell in love with Henry James. She loved the independent women in his stories. These women sacrificed their happiness but they did the right thing, she would say.

Razieh was curious. Curiosity, the desire to know another, is “insubordination in its purest form,” as Vladimir Nabokov said. You don’t accept just what is but seek what could be or should be. After that term, I moved to Tehran University. I saw Razieh once on the street. She gave me a sign not to talk to her. It was the year after the revolution, and the repression had started. Some years later, Mahtab, another former student of mine, came to see me at Allameh Tabataba'i University, where I was teaching at the time. She had been in jail but had been released for good behavior. She had met Razieh in jail.

Razieh and Mahtab had forged a bond in prison over their love of literature. Razieh would talk about Henry James; Mahtab would talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald. At a certain point in her telling, Mahtab paused. “You know, Razieh was executed.” I can still see her. Even in prison, even while waiting for her execution, Razieh chose life. She reached far beyond her prison cell through literature. Her bond with the novels and stories of Henry James transcended death and reaffirmed life.

When I lived in Iran my father would tell me that this country is very ancient and was invaded many times. What gives us identity and continuity, he would say, is our poetry stretching back hundreds of years to Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Jami, and Saadi. When this regime came to power, they did more than arrest and kill poets and writers.

They tried to erase our cultural memory. They tried to destroy the statue of Ferdowsi, our epic poet, and rename the street honoring Omar Khayyam, our poet, astronomer, and philosopher. But Iranian women stood in front of that street sign and would not let them change it. It was one small victory among countless defeats. The regime would call our cultural traditions pagan, but Iranians still make pilgrimages to the shrines of our poets.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is the Soviet Union of the Muslim World—a modern theocracy with imperialist ambition—and it is an ideology, a system that has failed. When I look at the younger generation in Iran, I see hope. The protests are both new and rooted in our history. Women have been fighting for freedoms, gaining ground despite oppression. What gives me hope is seeing women and men, the merchants and the retirees, all sections of Iranian society come together in the recent protests.

I have been thinking of Vaclav Havel, who wrote, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” The protesters in Iran show us that freedom is an ordeal, and you even pay for it with your life. As told to Basharat Peer

The Islamic Republic’s Founding Myth

by Azadeh Moaveni

The Islamic Republic’s already lengthy catalogue of fears has ballooned of late: alongside the possibility of being overthrown by its own citizens, it is haunted by the prospect of a full accounting of the massacres it has carried out; by the tenuous loyalty of its army, and its empty coffers; and by the shadow of Israeli spies and Islamic State militants. What terrifies Iran’s theocrats the most, the fear that eclipses all their fears, is the ability of the people at large to clearly see the essential realities of the present regime.

While Iranians have heroically demanded a great many things in recent weeks—change, new rulers, democratic freedoms—they are fundamentally insisting on dismantling the meticulously curated edifice of deceit and falsehoods sustaining the state as it has been constructed since 1979. For the first time ever, by explicitly chanting the name of a specific, alternative leader in the streets, Iranians have emphasized the true problem: the biggest, the most unsustainable lie of all, they are collectively saying, is the system itself.

The founding myth of the Islamic Republic rested on a contract of rule that promised the people agency and accountability. Instead, it empowered an unelected, ever-shrinking clique answerable to no one but itself. For years, deception remained essential to its survival. Now, soaring food insecurity and hunger have exposed the system for what it truly is: a theoretical fabulism and a real life con. The profound significance of the recent protests lies in their creation of a vast public space where tens of thousands repudiated the lie in unison. The veil was shredded, the illusion was shattered. Nothing will ever be the same. That is why the regime has killed ruthlessly, and killed as it has never killed before.

On the road to this moment, the regime’s attempts to hide reality grew increasingly fantastic. I remember during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Western countries refused to sell the ventilators to Iran (sanctions are sanctions) and thousands were dying unnecessarily, the regime blanketed Tehran with billboards professing that Iranians had “overcome” the pandemic together. As if that one scalding insult wasn’t enough, the propaganda campaign went even further, with banners claiming that Iranians were triumphant in virtually all aspects of modern life—they were also world champions in sport, fine practitioners of democracy, innovators in medicine.

This while the regime banned women from global sports tournaments that might imperil their modesty, leading to defections of talented female athletes; while it tampered so egregiously with elections that many people stopped bothering to vote; while people suffered a catastrophic shortage of basic drugs.  

Every facet of life and governance is presented as the inverse of its lived reality. And anyone who dares to peek behind the curtain—journalists, dissident professors, activists, even, bizarrely, the Iranian president himself—becomes a threat to the regime.

The Iranian economy is a grand hall of mirrors, concealing criminal theft on an epic scale. Fake privatizations, hidden backroom tenders, currency tiers purportedly designed to favor consumers, and bank bailouts have enriched oligarchs rich while impoverishing the nation. The regime blames its bankruptcy on sanctions and claims to be working toward their removal while making foreign policy choices guaranteed to trigger more sanctions.

Every crisis is shrouded in lies that mask its real cause: Why is Tehran running out of water? Why is a gas-rich country facing electricity shortages? Why does a single family dominate the import of agricultural feed? Why, as a former mayor of Tehran, demanded in his newspaper last week, do 40 million Iranians live below the poverty line while the state operates mega charitable foundations with billion-dollar budgets ostensibly to help the poor? For this candor, his paper was shut down.

Demands for transparency are increasing because revelations about this despairing state of affairs will clarify precisely who is accountable. The truth risks bringing down the whole edifice, which is why the system writhes to hide who takes decisions large and small. Who decided the system for how oil revenue should be repatriated, leading to bottomless theft? The examples are endless. But concealment is expensive, and the regime is out of money. Previously, it had the funds to partially hide the consequences of its mismanagement and theft through subsidies and handouts. Now, bankruptcy is bringing clarity.

The failure of the regime’s ideological project has been evident for at least two generations, but acknowledging how society has evolved—that it has long been living according to its own reality—remains forbidden. Protests in Iran are often symptoms of changes that have already occurred: a howling demand for these shifts to be recognized and for an end to the exhausting charade of pretense.

The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022 represented, in part, a collective act of refusal by women to perpetuate the charade of compliance with everything dress codes imposed by the state symbolized: ersatz piety, state hypocrisy, control over Iranian women’s bodies, and the manifest absence of the rule of the law. Women and girls had long defied the hijab law, but finally, fed up, they rose up and wielded the power of mass disobedience to extend their freedom into spaces symbolic of state control: schools, airports, and banks. It was as much a revolt by young girls and women against this façade as anything else.

What is striking about this specific generation of young Iranians is their moral clarity and demand for complete transparency. They have concluded that pragmatically maneuvering around lies, allowing the regime to operate in the shadows, makes collaborators of everyone. They refuse this abusive predicament. They refuse to be estranged from themselves by tolerating it. 

The regime’s war against transparency has led to increasingly bizarre scandals. The state filtering and control of the internet forces ordinary Iranians to purchase Iranian-made VPNs (made and sold by what one Iranian legislator called a “VPN mafia”). In November, X started revealing approximate locations of its users. Soon, Iranians found out that the regime had issued so-called white SIM cards that allowed unrestricted global internet access to thousands of journalists, officials, and pro-state figures. When it was revealed in December that some opposition journalists—the loudest critics of the regime—had quietly benefited from these “white SIMs” a scandal ensued that became a Russian nesting doll of lies.

The revelations of brazen digital inequality and manufactured dissent humiliated Iran’s President Massoud Pezeshkian, who had campaigned on lifting internet restrictions. He not only found himself stymied despite running the executive, but also had a major cover-up on his watch. Forced to turn his pledge into a lie, his dramatic solution was to impose filtering equally on everyone. He declared ominously: “We have instructed that these white internet lines be turned black as well, to show what will happen to people if this blackness continues.”

We have grown accustomed to asking what Iranians want, whether they prioritize livelihoods or democracy, whether they wish for a king but might tolerate a practical, secular general. Yet at every turn what they have been demanding is an end to the secrecy through which the regime hides its failings and imposes an alienated life of falseness on its people.  

Transparency is the one fundamental condition they demand, and with it would flow everything else: accountability, a revelation of the true causes of the country’s terminal condition, and the exposure of the regime’s structural rot. 

My Dream for Iran

by Arash Azizi

For years now, I have held on to a very specific dream. I am somewhere in Tehran, my hometown, canvassing for an election. I knock on an apartment door, and an elderly woman answers. “Madar Jaan,” I address her, using the Persian term of endearment and respect. “Will you consider voting for the Left Party of Iran?”

Sometimes, in the dream, she tells me to get lost. Other times, she shows interest, and I explain that our party is socialist, that we want to build more Metro stops and open a new factory in the neighborhood. She says she’ll think about it. The biggest dreams sound so ordinary. The scene from my dream is commonplace not only in my adopted home, the United States, and other liberal democracies, but even, in a constrained fashion, in the neighboring Turkey and Pakistan. For it to come true in Iran, much would have to change.

I was born in Iran in 1988. For all but the first year of my life, my homeland has been ruled by the same man: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who has final authority over every major decision but is accountable to no one. I have voted in the elections of the Islamic Republic but every candidate on every ballot was vetted for total fealty to Khamenei. A political party sharing my own convictions of democratic socialism couldn’t dream of legally existing in Iran. Neither could any political party outside the Islamist framework. This prohibition has kept me away from Iran for years now. My politics renders me persona non grata.

Every protest in Iran is a reminder of the Islamic Republic’s cruelty and a renewed call for its demise. Even the slightest improvement seems unimaginable without an end to the regime. But I have never believed it enough to simply declare what we oppose, what we don’t want. We must also dream of what could be. My very specific fantasies about the Iran of the future are my way of keeping the political imagination alive and open.

One day at the height of the anti-regime mass protests in Iran in 2022, I had a long, tearful conversation with a dear friend. We allowed ourselves to alternate our mourning with dreams about the future. My friend and I, like most Iranians, are embarrassingly exceptionalist about our homeland, convinced that Iran can rival any country in its offerings. 

We dreamed of working for the Iranian tourism board, designing ad campaigns to lure travelers from every corner of the world. Iran’s Shia shrines already draw millions of pilgrims from Muslim countries. We dreamed of a day when millions of Jews might also visit the Tomb of Esther and Mordechai in Hamadan, and millions of Baha’is could visit the holiest land of their faith.

We dreamed that the Saadi Foundation, a government-run institution dedicated to promoting Persian language, might host well-attended classes in Lisbon, Montreal and Johannesburg. Instead of its current fare of dour Islamist pretension, it would offer the best of Iranian arts and culture: our cinema, our poetry, perhaps even our wine. I am sure my more artful compatriots would come up with something less tacky but we did come up with a tagline: “Taste the Shiraz Wine That’s Actually from Shiraz.”

Of Iran’s many squandered possibilities, the waste of our soft power stings the most. Even if Iran never became a robust democracy, couldn’t its institutions at least align more closely with our national interests and our cultural heritage? Couldn’t we use them not to further some regressive ideology but to disseminate our culture and leverage it for economic growth?

Some might argue that fantasies, by definition, know no bounds. I don’t dream of democracy as some promised land of milk and honey but as what it actually is: a parliament composed of representatives freely chosen by the populace; a chance, I would have, to persuade a fellow Iranian to vote for my politics.

I know that, no matter what follows the regime, we are not about to be Denmark. All I want is for us to have a chance to serve our country. The Iranian state was a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Ours is one of a handful of countries never colonized by Europeans. Freed from the ideologues who have held them hostage, even most bureaucrats serving in the Islamic Republic today could rediscover the best of our history and reorient their efforts toward our nation’s improvement.

In my dreams, I always remember that Iran is not mine alone. Like any other country, we have our social progressives and our conservatives, our devout and our atheists, our saints and our crooks. And with so much murder and mayhem in our contemporary history, many Iranians treat one another with suspicion and rancor.

But I continue to set my north star with a slogan once used by Iranian reformists: “Iran for all Iranians.” I dream, then, of lazing on the beautiful beaches of the Caspian Sea or the Persian Gulf, where some Iranians would don a bikini and others a burkini. I dream of frequenting a leftist bookstore on Tehran’s fabled Enghelab Avenue while others browse its Islamist or libertarian counterparts. In my fantasies, we all share the country together, without tearing it apart for the sake of our vision.

As Iranians mourn and bury their loved ones—killed in their thousands by the regime this month—it is hard to speak of fantasies. Though I see writing on the wall for the Islamic Republic, I know we have no easy path to democratization. But I will never stop dreaming of the Iran that could be.

Iran Is Beautiful

by Ramin Jahanbegloo

On Feb.1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran after 15 years of exile in Turkey, Iraq, and a little village outside Paris. Millions of Iranians saw him as a spiritual man who would usher in democracy and deliver a better economic life. They welcomed him. Khomeini and his supporters delivered neither. Instead, they gradually transformed the Shah’s authoritarian, secular monarchy into a totalitarian theocracy.

From the earliest days of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iranians found themselves confronted with a political theology that defined the ideological contours of the power struggle in their society. The people’s sovereignty and capacity for collective action were eclipsed by an uncompromising, monolithic order embodied in Ayatollah Khomeini’s leadership and institutionalized through his doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih (the guardianship of the Islamic jurist), which concentrated authority in the hands of a supreme religious jurist. 

The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih allowed Khomeini to supersede the political views of other government officials and the popular will itself. The constitution was thus wrested from the Iranian people and appropriated by a ruling cadre that imposed its own interpretation of Islamic law upon them. Blind obedience to the Supreme Leader’s will transformed violence against victims into patriotism and a righteous struggle against “corruptors on earth.” 

Subsequently, the loss of rights suffered by a wide range of Iranians—Baha'is, gays, feminists, dissenting intellectuals, and young people with non-ideological dreams—became a widespread loss of identity. But as the population swelled from around 38.5 million in 1980 to over 92 million today, post-revolutionary Iran grew younger and more rebellious than revolutionary.

Over the past 30 years, a new type of Iranian, who is defined by the absence of ideology, has emerged. These Iranians embrace individualism and global culture through the internet, and simply want to exist and act as citizens within their society. A new vision of society has taken hold in Iran—nourished by these new Iranians, particularly young women—and it has chipped away at the legitimacy of the regime.

For more than four decades, Iranian women have been trying to reclaim parts of their personal lives upended by the revolution in 1979. One of the defining images of the revolution in 1979 was an Iranian woman in a traditional black Shiite chador holding a G-3 rifle. Today, the iconic image of the protests in Iran is different: a young woman setting her headscarf on fire and chanting against Iran’s clerical rulers.

Violence has been the primary language of the Islamic Republic since 1979. The regime has repeatedly met economic, social and political demands of Iranian citizens with prison cells and graves. The 1979 revolution did not leave any space for persuasion, plurality, and mutual recognition. Political authority does not rest with citizens acting together; it is controlled by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards. For 47 years, violence has forced compliance, but it has not generated legitimacy for the Iranian regime. 

Every turn to state violence in Iran has served as evidence of erosion of its authority, a self-defeating strategy to maintain the status quo: violence substitutes consent with massacre and undermines the popular legitimacy on which any government ultimately rests. And yet, after 47 years of civil resistance and nonviolent confrontation, Iranians have converted the loss of their sons and daughters, and their private sufferings into public claims. They have built new, lasting repertoires of protest and forms of dissent that survive individual campaigns of repression.

Today Iranians are mourning thousands of their fellow citizens who were massacred during savage crackdowns on recent protests in Iran. What endures after all the killings is storytelling. If Iran is to have a democratic future, the differences within the Iranian society have to be confronted and argued through, not buried. That work carries a warning: ending an illegitimate government is to refuse to support a new dictatorial and corrupted regime. 

To be an Iranian today is to live within the memory and continuity of Persian civilization, to sustain an ethics of beauty and embody an act of resistance against an ugly and tyrannical Iran. If Iran remains beautiful, then the idea of Persia is more than mere ornament adorning the corpse of an ancient civilization. It is the revolt of beauty and freedom against the ugliness of tyranny and the wilful forgetting of horror.

Iranian Progress Cannot Be Stopped

by Shahrnush Parsipur

Translated by Sara Khalili

Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran resembles a half-lifeless body collapsed on the ground, yet still possessing powerful arms. With the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other military forces, it has attacked the people of Iran and, through widespread killings, has delivered a brutal blow to the popular uprising. Yet this is only a temporary success. The republic is already dead morally, economically, and socially.

In just a short span, the currency collapsed, and the dollar surged from 70,000 rials to more than 1,400,000 rials. The government has become one of the most disgraced regimes in the world, it has dragged the country into deep decline, and it is now incapable of feeding its own people. Even if we assume that the regime has narrowly escaped collapse at this moment, its political survival must be understood as temporary rather than enduring. It will fall at another. All that is required is for the backbone of the Revolutionary Guards to break—and this is not a fantasy, but a realistic possibility. Ultimately, the Guards themselves will turn toward the people.

Over the past several years, Iranians have repeatedly risen in the streets to oppose the regime, driven by a complete exhaustion of tolerance for the Islamic Republic. This government has been hated since its formation. The first demonstration against it took place within the very first month of its establishment, when women poured into the streets to protest compulsory hijab. At that time, men remained largely silent, believing the issue of forced hijab to be unimportant—unaware that “women’s hijab” would soon be placed on their heads as well. When men are unable to form political parties and are forced to live under an imposed Islamic order, they too are, in effect, veiled.

Soon after that initial protest, dissatisfaction spread and the country entered a long downward spiral. Liquor stores were shut down. Dancing was banned. At the same time, prisons filled beyond capacity, and the same groups that had once fallen victim to the Shah’s executions were now being executed again. Approximately ten thousand members of the Mujahedin and leftist political organizations were sent before firing squads. A significant portion of the population emigrated and scattered across the world. Nearly all of Iran’s top students left the country.

Public life grew uniformly austere: radio and television programming was reduced to religious content, political activity was prohibited, university professors were dismissed, and hostility toward the United States and Israel intensified. Cities took on the atmosphere of graveyards, and mourning black became the dominant color of daily life. The Islamic Republic rejected pre-Islamic Persian history, as if nothing of value had existed in Persia before Islam. Ancient history was removed from textbooks and effectively erased from public education.

Despite it all, Iranians remained progressive and creative. Writers and filmmakers produced works of great value. The populace continued to advance, remaining active in every field. This persistence troubled certain foreign powers that, at various moments, had supported the Islamic Republic in the hope of weakening Iran as a nation.

Yet Iranians continued to progress. Gradually, they began to reshape and reform the system from within. Political activity slowly reemerged. These efforts repeatedly culminated in mass protests demanding change and the end of the government. Compulsory hijab has all but disappeared since the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini and the globally echoed “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement.

The unrest of January 2026 marks the most significant moment in this long struggle. Intolerable economic conditions drove Iranians to the limits of their endurance. Bazaar merchants took to the streets, and the public stood behind them. A genuine uprising took shape—so significant that many now refer to it as a revolution.

As this article is being written, the movement continues. The Islamic Republic has shut down the internet and cut off telephone communications, paralyzing the country. The regime is resorting to massacres to suppress the unrest. Thousands have been killed. Thousands more have been imprisoned.

Still, the protesters have not capitulated. This uprising is momentous and will have profound consequences. It began in a way that ensures its continuation. At present, with all forms of communication severed between the people of Iran and the outside world, we remain uncertain of the precise developments unfolding inside the country. However, we have seen heartbreaking images of overflowing morgues, masses of young victims wrapped in black shrouds, families wandering among them in search of their loved ones.

I believe the fate of the Islamic Republic will soon be determined. It will either collapse or undergo fundamental reform and transformation. My prediction is that figures from within the Revolutionary Guards will seize power. Although the slogan most often heard is “Long live the monarchy,” I do not believe this will become reality. We must wait and see what unfolds.