Zahak versus Husayni

On March 1, 2026, Reza Pahlavi issued his statement on the killing of Ali Khamenei: “Ali Khamenei, the Zahhak of our time; the evil being who, just a few weeks ago, issued the order to slaughter tens of thousands of Iran’s finest children, is gone.“

The Shahnameh framing was not ornamental. For years, Pahlavi has used the Zahhak figure, the serpent-shouldered tyrant who fed on the brains of Iran’s youth, as his shorthand for the Islamic Republic.

And Khamenei, symmetrically, had organized his entire ideological project around the Husayni archetype: the martyr of Karbala, the one who refused submission before Yazid’s overwhelming power. Every day is Ashura. Every land is Karbala. That was the grammar of the revolution.

Now the “Zahhak” is dead (or the Husseiny attained martyrdom depending on your viewpoint). The question that follows is the only one that matters: who is Iran?

The data on religion is genuinely contested. Iran’s official census claims 99.5% Muslim. The World Values Survey (2020) found 96.6% identify as Muslim, with 1.3% atheist. But GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based research group running anonymized online surveys, found in 2020 that only 40% of respondents identified as Shia Muslim’ with 8.8% identifying as atheist and 22% as unaffiliated.

A leaked Iranian government culture ministry survey reported 73% favor separating religion from state. The World Values Survey and GAMAAN are measuring different things: official identity versus lived belief. The most defensible summary is that Iran’s formal religious allegiance has weakened dramatically since 1979; he Islamic Republic manufactured the very secularism that now threatens it. As sociologist Asef Bayat calls it: post-Islamism. Faith may persist privately; political Islam has lost the argument.

Iran is also 77% urban, deeply connected (82 million internet users, 96% penetration rate as of 2022), and young; a population that overwhelmingly grew up inside the Islamic Republic and predominantly wants it gone. The January 2026 protests that preceded this war were the largest since 1979. The regime’s response was a massacre: estimates range from 3,000 (the government’s figure) to 20,000–32,000 (Trump’s figure; U.S.-based human rights groups estimated 7,000).

But Iran is not only Tehran. The IRGC has 200,000 members. The Basij militia has roughly 1 million. The clerical establishment controls deep networks of patronage across smaller cities and rural provinces. The celebrants in Los Angeles and Isfahan are real; so are the mourners carrying Khamenei’s portrait in Baghdad and Karachi.

Reza Pahlavi is the most visible alternative, currently in Paris, offering a four-point transition program: territorial integrity, separation of religion and state, equality under law, and free elections. He says he is not running for king, only for transitional leadership. He has not lived in Iran since 1978. He was 17 when he left. His ties to Israel are close. He is polarizing; celebrated by the Tehrangeles diaspora and urban secular Iranians, viewed with suspicion by many who see him as a Western-backed figurehead with no base inside the country.

The IRGC and Basij are the regime, not Khamenei. This is the basic point the Council on Foreign Relations made within hours of the strikes: “Taking out Iran’s Supreme Leader is not the same as regime change. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the regime.“

The American political picture is stark. Reuters/Ipsos, polling February 28 – March 1, found 27% of Americans approve of the strikes, 43% disapprove, 29% unsure. YouGov found 34% approval, 44% disapproval. For comparison: Afghanistan 2001 polled at 92% approval. Iraq 2003 polled at 71%. This is the first major U.S. military action where more Americans opposed it than supported it at the outset. Among independents, disapproval runs at 52%. Even 42% of Republicans say they would be less likely to support the operation if it leads to U.S. troop casualties; and three American soldiers are already dead.

The mythological frame Pahlavi and Khamenei both used turns out to be the honest one. There really are two Irans: one that sees itself as Husayni; resistant, martyred, carrying the flame against imperial power, and one that sees itself as waiting for Kaveh’s uprising against a Zahhak that consumed its children. The war is being run by a third party, Washington and Tel Aviv, that has mapped its own interests onto the second Iran without fully inhabiting either archetype.

Nineteen days from Nowruz, we are watching the oldest argument in Persian political theology play out in real time, with American and Israeli bombs as the adjudicating instrument.

Whether that instrument produces Fereydun’s kingdom or something worse is the question Iran, all of it, will answer, probably at great cost.