Michael Bonner: Are we witnessing the last gasp of Iran’s Islamic Republic?

American and Israeli bombardment of Iran’s nuclear sites and military stockpiles, and the killing of senior regime personnel, prompt the perennial question: Will the Islamic Republic of Iran finally collapse? There is a sense in which this has already happened. To paraphrase Voltaire, the Islamic Republic of Iran is neither Islamic nor republican. It has deteriorated into little more than a nationalist tyranny. The Iranian regime has lacked legitimacy from the moment it was founded in the Revolution of 1979. Its prime mover, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, preached an Islamic universalism that failed to take hold. Senior clergy—the grand ayatollahs of the Shia holy sites in Iran and abroad—rejected Ayatollah Khomeini’s political Islam in its infancy, as many still do. Shiite Muslims outside Iran have never rallied to Khomeini’s standard. It was notably an embarrassment that Iraqi Shiites failed to rise against Saddam Hussein amidst the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). And the rest of the Muslim world still views political Shiism as a heretical aberration. Instead of a renewed Islamic world system radiating out of Iranian civilization, the Islamic Republic of Iran became merely another incarnation of mid-20th-century Third Worldism. The mullahs might well have been incompetent, but what mattered was that Iran had a governing system all its own—”neither East nor West but Islamic Republic,” as the rhyming Persian revolutionary slogan had it. Khomeini’s vision of universal Islamic government quickly mutated into a “resistance” movement. Banishing foreign, and especially American, influence from Iran and its environs and struggling against colonialism became the regime’s highest callings. It was the disaster of the Iran-Iraq war that provoked this. Hussein seized the opportunity to strangle the Iranian Revolution in the cradle, and Iranian forces fought to a stalemate at enormous national cost: human wave tactics, nearly 100,000 dead child soldiers, and a total death toll of at least 500,000. Spreading Islamic government had proved impossible, and the best the regime could aim for was the defence of the Iranian nation alone. But now Iran’s resistance movement is in ruins. Shutting out the West rapidly shrivelled into harassment of Israel through Hamas and Hezbollah. But they and Iran’s other proxies throughout the Middle East are all but neutered now, thanks to Israel’s ferocious reaction to the attack of October 7. The fall of Bashar al-Assad shattered Iran’s greatest strategic partnership. No proxy or other supposed ally came to Iran’s aid amidst recent Israeli and American bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities.  In the present moment of extreme tension, nationalist tub-thumping is the order of the day, not appeals to Muslim unity or the theory of Shiite martyrdom. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while in hiding, reverted to nationalist sloganeering in the aftermath of American and Israeli attacks. And when he emerged, visibly shaken and diminished, his first televised address called down the protection of God on “this nation” and saluted Iran as a “ strong, vast country” and “an ancient civilization.” The Iranian nation, he said, “is noble and will remain noble,” it is “a nation with such a history, such a rich culture, and a steadfast national determination,” and so forth—words that could just as easily have been spoken by the late shah. Lately, billboards and posters have begun to appear with images of pre-Islamic Persia and ancient Iranian mythology. A huge mural on the side of a building depicts the mythical hero Arash, the mighty bowman in Zoroastrian scripture and the Persian National Epic, shooting an arrow assisted by a volley of ballistic missiles. The third-century monumental rock relief showing the humiliation of the Roman Emperor Valerian by King Shapur I (r. 240–270) has been reimagined with Benjamin Netanyahu kneeling before the Zoroastrian Shahanshah.1In the tradition of the ancient kings who carved their inscriptions in three languages, slogans appear in Persian, Hebrew, and English. “Since the dawn of time, the zeal of men has brought cowards to their knees,” says a Persian rhyming couplet. The Hebrew and English: “Kneel before the Iranians.” The Islamic element of the Islamic Republic has always been doubtful anyway. The thought-world of the mullahs was never that of 7th-century Medina or the Golden Age of medieval Islam. Their minds have always been haunted by miniskirts, bikinis, immodest hairdos, hydrocarbons, missiles, and latterly centrifuges and nuclear bombs. And so it should be no surprise that attendance at Friday prayers is so meagre that 50,000 Iranian mosques out of a total of 75,000 have been forced to close in recent years. Islam is, in fact, the fastest shrinking religion in Iran, and is rapidly being replaced by Christianity.2The number of secret “house churches” is difficult to pinpoint, but estimates vary from around half a million to more than a million. So threatening is the spread of Christianity that the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence has formed a sort of inquisition to combat it, albeit without success. Iran’s supposedly republican constitution is an even greater sham. The Ayatollah Khomeini gave no thought to popular sovereignty and assumed that all would be well if a cleric like himself ruled on behalf of God. And yet, the Iranian constitution gives sovereignty both to God, ruling through the supreme leader, and to the people, who elect Iran’s parliament and the president. Both cannot be true, as many critics have pointed out. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Banisadr, notably protested that the constitution effectively made the supreme jurist an absolute ruler. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision may have failed, but Iran is still ruled by incompetent and sadistic thugs. Iran may be hardly Islamic or republican, but it is nevertheless a tyranny. The bullies and murderers who run it should not only be removed from power but also tried and punished. If most Iranians had their way, this is probably what would happen. A survey conducted by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) tested public opinion on the Iranian Regime after the 2022 protests about the murder of Mahsa Amini by the so-called Morality Police. The result was that 81 percent rejected the Islamic Republic. Only 15 percent claimed to support it, and a mere 4 percent were unsure. Under normal circumstances, polling like that would suggest that such an unpopular regime could not be long for this world. It has nevertheless endured because of disunity among the opposition: No one can agree on what should come next, though the truth is that almost anything else would be better. The regime is much degraded and fragile, but it is still impossible to say when its last vestiges will disappear. The end may come tomorrow, spurred on by warfare and chaos, or it may be in the days, months, or years to come. But the end will come, and it will spell yet another defeat, perhaps the final defeat, of political Islam. The Islamic Republic will join the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS on the ash heap of history, and it will have only itself to blame. Of all possible paradoxes and contradictions of 21st-century modernity, the self-abolition of the Islamic Republic of Iran may prove to be one of the strangest.