Iran in the grip of double violence

Trapped between repression and sanctions

- ALI RIDHA KHAN

WHAT confronts Iran today is not simply a crisis of governance, nor merely a generational revolt.

It is a deeper contradiction: a revolution that survived by turning history into administration and faith into discipline. A generation that does not remember 1979 is nonetheless governed as if remembrance itself were a form of obedience. Memory is demanded not as reflection, but as ritual.

Protest emerges, then, not as nostalgia for the Revolution, nor merely as resistance to its petrified afterlife, but as revolt against a political order in which history has hardened into management and survival has replaced dignity.

To think this moment seriously requires returning to Ali Shariati — not as a saint of revolutionary Islam, but as its most dangerous internal critic. Shariati did not understand revolution as a completed event, but as an unresolved ethical tension between liberation and domination, resistance and its betrayal. His work insists that revolutions fail not because they lack force, but because they forget the human beings they claim to free.

This must be stated plainly. Iran is already a protest society. Long before moments of mass mobilisation draw international attention, the country is marked by daily, localised uprisings — over unpaid wages, collapsing subsidies, fuel prices, bread shortages, water access, and the erosion of ordinary life. These protests are not ideological performances. They are struggles over survival.

To ignore this material density would be to romanticise dissent. Protest in Iran does not begin in theory, but in kitchens, workplaces, markets, and factories. Like South Africa, Iran experiences near-constant protest precisely because the reproduction of everyday life has become precarious.