Iran cannot be analysed using the same political categories as Pakistan or most modern states. The difference is not whether a regime is monarchical, clerical, or military. It is the age of the civilisation being governed. Pakistan is a young state. Its borders, institutions, and political language were assembled in the twentieth century. In such states, power fills a vacuum directly.
Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones
A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.
Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration
When Iran was ruled by kings, monarchy was not merely a system of governance. It was cosmology. Kingship was linked to justice, order, and civilisation itself, from the Achaemenids through the Pahlavis. When monarchy collapsed, it did not collapse as a technical system. It collapsed as a civilisational institution. That distinction matters. Administrative failures can be replaced easily. Civilisational failures leave residue. This is why nostalgia for monarchy in Iran does not translate into simple restoration politics. The memory persists, but the form cannot simply be reinstalled. Iran moved on, but it moved on within its own historical grammar.
Shi‘ism and the Islamic Republic
Shi‘ism explains why the Islamic Republic functions differently from a generic theocracy. Clerics did not invent legitimacy in 1979. They organised an inheritance that already existed. Shi‘ism had been woven into Iranian identity for centuries, shaping law, ritual, memory, and authority. The state did not create religion. It administered a civilisational framework that was already legible to society. This is why Iran cannot be ruled by raw coercion without losing authority. Force alone has never been enough. Power must feel historical to endure.
Why a Military Takeover Would Fail
This is where fantasies about a clean military takeover by the IRGC go wrong. A purely military regime would feel thin and temporary. Force might hold, but legitimacy would not. Iran has never been governed by command alone. Its systems have always required symbolic depth. When that depth disappears, the state destabilises. This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one. Military rule is not a neutral option that can be dropped into any society.
China and the Problem of Self-Rule
China clarifies the same point. The Chinese Communist Party is not democratic in a procedural sense, yet it governs through ideology, bureaucracy, and historical narrative. It claims continuity, national destiny, and collective order. Whether one accepts that claim is secondary. What matters is that it structures authority. Self-rule is not synonymous with elections. Ancient states require legitimacy that is intelligible to history.
India and Civilisational Continuity
India exposes the same analytical error. There is a persistent claim that India did not exist before modern nationalism, as if civilisation begins with a passport. This is untenable. The Indus Valley civilisation is among the oldest on earth, comparable to Egypt and Mesopotamia. India is its inheritor, just as Iran is the inheritor of ancient Persian worlds. This does not make India or Iran virtuous. It makes them continuous.
Why Pakistan Is Different
Continuity is power. It allows societies to absorb autocracy, experiment with democracy, survive collapse, and regenerate authority without disintegrating. There is something old to stitch consensus around. Pakistan does not have this advantage. That is not an insult. It is a structural description. Pakistan is a young nation with a strong ideology and a shallow historical state tradition. Its political struggle has always been to manufacture coherence quickly. The army filled that role. Ideology attempted to compensate for time.
History Is Not Evenly Distributed
Iran will resolve its crisis according to its long memory, not according to modern templates. India does the same. Pakistan is still writing its memory. History is not evenly distributed, and governance reflects that inequality. Recognising this is not elitism. It is realism.
When monarchy collapsed, it did not COLLAPSE as a technical system. It collapsed as a civilisational institution.
It did not COLLAPSE. The monarchy was eliminated as part of the the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, that took place in 1905.
Constitutionalist forces marching to Tehran, forced (King) Mohammad Ali Shah’s abdication in favour of his young son, Ahmad Shah Qajar, and re-established the constitution in 1909
In 1025 a COMMONER (military officer and politician) called Reza Shah overthre the last monarch of the Qajar Dynasty Ahmad Shah Qajar. Reza Shah then called himself Reza Shah Pahlavi and became Shah of Iran
This was much like what happened in 1953 Egypt. General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser,forces King Farouk 1 to abdicate. June 1953, the revolutionary government formally abolished the monarchy, ending 150 years of the Muhammad Ali dynasty’s rule, and Egypt was declared a republic. (Naguib and Nasser unlike Reza Shah did not call themselves Kings)
King Farouk 1’s sister, Princess Fawzia bint Fuad, was the first wife and consort of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The marriage in 1939 was a political deal to bring respectability to the new Iranian regime by association with the much more prestigious Egyptian royal house
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution
“Not the important parts either”– May I remind you that Lahore was the Mughal capital from 1584 to 1598. This Mughal heritage is evidenced by sites such as the Shahi Kila, Badshahi Mosque, Shalimar Gardens etc. Jahangir is buried in Lahore as is Empress Nur Jahan.
Lahore was Mahraja Ranjit Singh’s capital and also the capital of the undivided Punjab.
There is no need to constantly troll Pakistan.
West Punjab had the prime agricultural lands.
Calling Pakistan a rump state is wrong; it is a crucial strategic buffer.
Present-day Pakistan sits on the land that gave us Takshashila, arguably Vishnugupt. Lets not diminish its history simply because present-day residents are short-sighted enough to do so.
On what basis? If your claim is that Taxila is part of “Indian” culture and not “Pakistani” culture because it is a pre-Islamic site than all the Mughal monuments of Delhi and Agra are part of Pakistani culture because the Mughals were Muslim and not Hindu.
Frankly, this is a ridiculous argument either way.
Culture doesn’t stop at the borders of modern nation-states.
You will have to deal with the fact that–whether you like it or not– Moenjodaro, Harappa, Taxila are all within Pakistan’s geographical boundaries. We will have to deal with the fact that the great Muslim monuments of Delhi and Agra are in India’s hands.
As a Pakistani, I have consistently argued that we should own all the history located within the geographical boundaries of our nation-state–whether that history is Islamic or not.
Yes but India constitutionally does not style itself a Hindu state though it does give preference to Hindu cultural ideals.
At this point, that is a fig leaf.
You may not like it or choose to admit it but at this point India is a majoritarian Hindu state just as Pakistan is a majoritarian Muslim state. Pakistan is simply more honest that it is a state for Muslims first.
A secular state cannot “give preference to Hindu cultural ideals”. That is not secularism under any definition of the term.
You don’t understand the difference between facts and opinions. Any twelve year old American child understands this. But then you sadly didn’t have the benefit of being educated in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US.
I can only pity you.
Why can’t Kabir stake his own identity?
How are NWFP (Central Asia) and Baluchistan (Middle East) culturally Indian?
Btw, NWFP and Baluchistan are arguably…….. as much Indian, as they are Pakistani. The same arguments apply, no?. *shrug*
Your nation-state doesn’t own all of South Asia’s history and culture.
I have no problem with the fact that my paternal grandmother was from Agra. She was from BRITISH India not the nation-state of India.
Whatever helps you sleep at night. Get a life.
on a similar way, i had read in a column of farruk dhondy, that ‘dasturs’ the high priests of Zoroastrianism, became ayatollahs etc when persia became islamic? is this true?
Sounds very doubtful.. Iran imported the
Shiite clergy from Lebanon and Iraq during the Safavid era.
If war happens in Iran, oil price will shoot up. Bad for Sri Lanka and much of the world. The Saudis and Mid east oil countries will love it
Iran refrained from imposing a blockade on the strait during the 12-day US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic in June 2025, but has repeatedly warned it could be an option in any upcoming attack on the country.
Approximately 37 percent of global oil traffic passes through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis.
Iran Unveils More Deep Underground Missile Tunnels, Warns Can Close Strait of Hormuz
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iran-unveils-more-deep-underground-missile-tunnels-warns-can-close-strait-hormuz
Good riddance to a useless institution. There is no longer Rule of Law. Obama replaced International Law with a Rules Based Order. Now even that has been thrown out by Trump
Unpaid dues and reduced funding could halt the world body’s core operations by mid-2026, Antonio Guterres has warned
Unpaid dues and reduced funding could halt the world body’s core operations by mid-2026, Antonio Guterres has warned
https://www.rt.com/news/631792-un-financial-crisis-funding/
This is a genuinely incredible story.
The hottest term on Chinese social media right now is “kill-line”: if you go to Xiaohongshu, Bilibili or Douyin, everyone is speaking about it.
Why? It all has to do with the story of Alex, known as “牢A” (“Láo A”, literally “prison A” where A stands for Alex), a Chinese medical/biology student based in Seattle, USA, who worked part-time as a forensic assistant collecting unclaimed bodies (primarily homeless people).
You’ve doubtlessly never heard of him but he probably single-handedly shattered what remained of the “American Dream” myth for an entire generation of young Chinese.
In late 2025, Alex started going massively viral on Bilibili, a Chinese video platform, for videos where he described poverty in America. He coined the term “kill line” (“斩杀线”) – an expression borrowed from gaming describing when a game character’s health is so low one hit will finish them. In Alex’s framing, the concept describes how a single shock (illness, job loss, accident) can push middle-class Americans into irreversible poverty.
It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact he’s had in China. In barely a few weeks, “kill line” became part of everyday lexicon. So much so that even Qiushi – the core theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China – published a lengthy theoretical analysis using “kill line” as its central framework
This never happens. Gaming slang coined by a 22-year-old streamer based in the U.S. does not become the analytical framework for Qiushi, the CPC’s core theoretical journal, in just a handful of weeks. That’s normally not how Communist Party theory gets crafted, to put it mildly 😂. And yet here we are – which goes to show just how powerfully Alex resonated.
It didn’t take long for America to notice – and for Alex’s problems to start.
Due to the staggering resonance his content was having in China, Alex became the target of an extremely vicious doxxing campaign by Chinese dissidents.
He also got targeted by Western media with the New York Times, among others, publishing a piece identifying him as the origin of the phenomenon which they described – unsurprisingly – as Communist propaganda meant to “deflect criticism of [Chinese] leaders.”
I just wrote an article telling the full story. It ends with Alex escaping to China in an extraction worthy of a Cold War spy novel. Think about how extraordinary this is: a Chinese student fleeing to China for safety, because he feared for his life after being harassed for describing poverty in America.
Full Story here
https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-incredible-story-of-alex-forced?
This is a genuinely incredible story.
The hottest term on Chinese social media right now is “kill-line”: if you go to Xiaohongshu, Bilibili or Douyin, everyone is speaking about it.
Why? It all has to do with the story of Alex, known as “牢A” (“Láo A”, literally “prison A” where A stands for Alex), a Chinese medical/biology student based in Seattle, USA, who worked part-time as a forensic assistant collecting unclaimed bodies (primarily homeless people)
.
You’ve doubtlessly never heard of him but he probably single-handedly shattered what remained of the “American Dream” myth for an entire generation of young Chinese.
In late 2025, Alex started going massively viral on Bilibili, a Chinese video platform, for videos where he described poverty in America. He coined the term “kill line” (“斩杀线”) – an expression borrowed from gaming describing when a game character’s health is so low one hit will finish them. In Alex’s framing, the concept describes how a single shock (illness, job loss, accident) can push middle-class Americans into irreversible poverty.
It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact he’s had in China. In barely a few weeks, “kill line” became part of everyday lexicon. So much so that even Qiushi – the core theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China – published a lengthy theoretical analysis using “kill line” as its central framework
This never happens. Gaming slang coined by a 22-year-old streamer based in the U.S. does not become the analytical framework for Qiushi, the CPC’s core theoretical journal, in just a handful of weeks. That’s normally not how Communist Party theory gets crafted, to put it mildly . And yet here we are – which goes to show just how powerfully Alex resonated.
It didn’t take long for America to notice – and for Alex’s problems to start.
Due to the staggering resonance his content was having in China, Alex became the target of an extremely vicious doxxing campaign by Chinese dissidents.
He also got targeted by Western media with the New York Times, among others, publishing a piece identifying him as the origin of the phenomenon which they described – unsurprisingly – as Communist propaganda meant to “deflect criticism of [Chinese] leaders.”
I just wrote an article telling the full story. It ends with Alex escaping to China in an extraction worthy of a Cold War spy novel. Think about how extraordinary this is: a Chinese student fleeing to China for safety, because he feared for his life after being harassed for describing poverty in America.
Full Story here
https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-incredible-story-of-alex-forced?