How will the Iranian Regime Survive? By Becoming Persian & Crowning a Pahlavi Queen

Iran After Ideology

The Iranian Revolution survived because it fused two forces that had long resisted foreign domination: Shi‘i Islam and Persian historical memory. It endures today because it still commands the machinery of the state. But endurance is not the same as viability. The revolution has reached a point where its original ideological heft, once an asset, has become its primary liability.

The Iranian Revolution must become Iranian. Not rhetorically, but structurally. Islam can no longer function as an export ideology or as a permanent mobilisation doctrine. It must become a civilisational substrate: Islam with Persian characteristics, not Persian life bent permanently around Islamic revolution. The clerical class has to accept a hard truth that other revolutionary elites eventually learn; that ideology is a ladder, not a house. Nuclear ambition, permanent resistance, and theological maximalism were once instruments of leverage. Today they are liabilities. Iran is not losing legitimacy because it is insufficiently Islamic; it is losing legitimacy because it insists on remaining revolutionary long after the revolution has exhausted its social utility.

The English Example Continue reading How will the Iranian Regime Survive? By Becoming Persian & Crowning a Pahlavi Queen

The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask

A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?

The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.

This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.

I. The Contract That Never Closed Continue reading The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask

Brown Pundits