Iran today is arguing not with the world, but with the moral promise that once gave its revolution meaning. In Nahjul Balagha, that luminous compendium of sermons, letters and aphorisms attributed to Imam Ali and central to Shi’a ethical and political thought, the message is unambiguous: a State may survive many things, but it cannot long survive injustice.
It is this question of injustice—felt, remembered and shouted—that hangs over Iran’s streets. And it is in this register that the exiled Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah—once described as the ‘clown’ prince’—has claimed that what is underway is not simply unrest, but revolution.
At a time when images struggle to escape digital blackouts, when funerals turn into protests and when fear has returned to public life as a governing instrument, the Islamic Republic confronts a reckoning that is political and moral. Reports of sweeping repression, mass arrests, harsh sentencing and killings on a scale that shocks even a society long familiar with State coercion have shifted the crisis from unrest to rupture. What is unfolding is no longer only a confrontation between the State and the street. It is a contest over legitimacy itself.
The immediate triggers are brutally ordinary: fuel shocks, food prices, wages that do not stretch and an economy that has turned daily life into calculation. Demonstrations that began in provincial towns have spread to major cities, drawing in students, bazaar merchants, oil-sector workers and clerical families. In the bazaars of Isfahan and Tabriz, shopkeepers have shuttered stores. In oil-producing Khuzestan, workers have staged stoppages over unpaid wages and water scarcity. Inflation has hovered near 40 percent for much of the past two years, while youth unemployment remains stubbornly high.
But what defines this moment is not only economic despair. It is the State’s readiness to answer grievance with overwhelming force. In several cities, mourning rituals for those killed have turned into gatherings where grief and dissent merge. In societies shaped by Shi’a memory, funerals do not remain funerals. They become testimony. The dead do not simply disappear; they return as symbols—sometimes as warnings, sometimes as witnesses. And when a State begins to fear mourning itself, it reveals not strength but anxiety.
To understand the depth of this rupture, one must begin not with geopolitics but with Karbala. In Shi’a consciousness, Karbala is not an episode frozen in the 7th century; it is a moral grammar. It teaches that power derives legitimacy only when it stands with justice, that authority divorced from compassion forfeits its claim, and that resistance, even when it fails materially, can prevail ethically. Karbala is not about victory; it is about moral standing.
Growing up in Srinagar in the years following the Iranian revolution of 1979, one encountered these echoes in unexpected ways. In parts of the city, and later in Kargil, posters of Ayatollah Khomeini appeared on walls otherwise reserved for local political imagery. They were not sectarian markers. They were symbols of defiance. For many young Muslims, Iran’s revolution represented the audacious idea that faith could confront domination without surrendering moral restraint.
That memory matters today because what is unfolding in Iran is not a rejection of the revolution but a reckoning with its inheritance. These protests are not ideologically imported movements. They are locally rooted expressions of fatigue and frustration. Inflation erodes subsidies that once cushioned daily life. Housing costs have risen far faster than incomes. A young, educated population, more than 60 percent of it aged below 40, faces shrinking avenues for social mobility.
This is not a revolt against faith. It is a demand that authority remember the ethical foundations that once justified its power. Yet, when such demands are met with bullets, prisons and intimidation, the demand becomes something else: a moral indictment. The Iranian revolution was rooted in the belief that authority carries moral responsibility. But over time, guardianship ossified into control; decision-making grew more centralised, securitised and insulated from everyday social feedback.
External pressure has aggravated this estrangement. Sanctions inflicted deep harm on society without decisively altering State behaviour.
Iran has reached a point where even silence is political. The first and most visible possibility is the continuation of repression: tighter surveillance, harsher punishment and a return to ‘order’ enforced by fear. But fear is a poor substitute for consent. You can clear a street with batons; you cannot clear a memory.
A second possibility is reform from within: limited, cautious, but real—an easing of coercion, some economic relief and a willingness to reopen political spaces. This would require the State to accept that what it faces is not simply a security threat but a legitimacy crisis, and that moral authority cannot be preserved by force. Such recalibration would not satisfy everyone, but it could arrest the slide into a permanent confrontation between the ruler and the ruled.
The third possibility is the one suggested by the language of revolution itself: a decisive break, where protests seek not mere policy change but a transformation of the political order. Whether such transformation arrives through sustained mobilisation, labour strikes, internal fractures within the elite, or a negotiated transition is uncertain.
External military intervention at this juncture would almost certainly be disastrous—inflaming regional tensions, endangering civilian lives and risking a wider conflagration. Indeed, while Donald Trump weighed strong options earlier in the crisis, wiser counsel and de-escalatory signals from regional and international actors appear to have nudged Washington away from direct military engagement, at least for the moment.
For India, the moment resonates on multiple registers. India’s relationship with Iran has been shaped by history, geography and pragmatism, energy ties, civilisational familiarity and connectivity through Chabahar. But New Delhi’s room for manoeuvre is constrained by great-power rivalries, reinforcing an instinct for restraint and de-escalation. In a region where certainty is often performative, restraint can become a strategic virtue.
For those who once saw the Iranian revolution as an assertion of dignity against domination, the present moment carries a quiet poignancy. A revolution born of Karbala’s ethic now confronts a question Karbala itself posed: can authority remain moral once it becomes deaf to dissent? And more urgently: can it claim the mantle of justice while producing the very martyrs that Shi’a history teaches society never to forget?
Amitabh Mattoo | Dean, School of International Studies, JNU; former member, National Security Advisory Board
(Views are personal)
(This is the first article in a regular series by the author)