On Feb. 28, Israel and the United States started a war on Iran. The day before, as I was dropping my daughter off at school, I lost my balance on a slippery sidewalk and took a tumble. I put myself together and hobbled my way to school. Although I was doing my best to appear composed, I couldn’t stop thinking of how rare that occurrence was — I hadn’t fallen in four years, and prior to that, this had happened to me only once in my adult life.
Shortly afterward, I remembered the dream I had just one night earlier, which I had totally forgotten when I woke up at twilight drenched in sweat. In the unhappy dream, someone had severed the brake line of a car I was supposed to drive, and then consistently encouraged me to take the wheel and steer. I hit the road, and the rest of it remains nebulous in my memory. In real life, I never drove a car and never obtained a license. And I am not a fan of detective movies.
My dreams have often been of a political nature, which I believe explains my profession. The dreams have mostly featured adventures, difficult conversations and flashbacks to past challenges. I have come to terms with these innocuous nightmares. They are disturbing at the time, but they never take a deep toll, and like the other elements of the world around me, I have accepted them for what they are.
For years, a couple of major threads have permeated my dreams, and one person has been the protagonist, until recently: Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Every now and then, I’d dream of heated debates, arguments and curious encounters with Khamenei. On many occasions, he scolded me. On other occasions, he found my arguments persuasive but was too arrogant to admit it and eventually let me walk away. In some conversations, nothing eerie happened, and when I woke up, I felt relieved that it wasn’t real.
Beginning in late 2024, the omnipresent protagonist of my innocuous nightmares changed, and the ayatollah was supplanted by then-incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. In the new series, we never talked, and I don’t remember having ever challenged or been challenged by him. It was just his constant, haunting presence that persisted.
But although Khamenei was a frequent attendant in my dreams, he didn’t matter to me as a defining character in real life. While the news publications I have worked with or followed as a reader have always understood Iran as a hermit kingdom ruled by the ayatollah and some other bad guys, I haven’t ever seen Iran through the prism of the all-powerful cleric and his drab world.
He amassed unlimited power and refused to introspect. But he wasn’t in control of every single Iranian’s mind and heart. I’d often skip his speeches and didn’t listen to them unless I felt they might generate international tensions or widen the social divides in Iran.
He was killed in an airstrike on the evening of Feb. 28, bringing an end to his 36-year rule as the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East. This is a historic moment, and a remarkable shift in the country’s trajectory. The outpouring of joy on the streets of Los Angeles and London, where Iranian expats displayed their relief over his departure, exposed the depth of agony that the Islamic republic has foisted on generations of its exiles.
From the student activists who endured the humiliation of interrogation rooms, where poorly trained Iranian intelligence agents resorted to the most vulgar insults to extract confessions, to the women who were rounded up together with their college classmates for partying in their flats with music and stage lights, and were then transported to reeducation centers in white vans striped with green, there are many who have good reason to celebrate the death of the patriarch.
The regime’s Machiavellian security apparatus has been so invasive, intransigent and anachronistic that even its insiders sporadically admit they only follow orders and know something is wrong. But they say they wish that the structure would be improved for the benefit of the “nezaam” — official jargon for the establishment (literally “order” or “arrangement”), but in effect a reference to a vaguely defined collective of the supreme leader, his wishes and his favored institutions, though not everything that operates inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In one interrogation session, shortly after the outbreak of the November 2019 protests, when I was covering the events from my home office in Rasht, the conversation veered into the idea of citizenship. The exchange was bitter but respectful, and the Ministry of Intelligence officer was not a resentful college student who would find me to be a representative of “global imperialism” in northern Iran. I told him why I believed many things were going wrong.
I also cited a personal experience. “I can say with confidence that I have not added a single trash item to the streets of this city. As a pedestrian, I have not crossed a single red light. … Instead of summoning me to come and explain my journalism, you should be looking for people who are blackmailing the officials of this country and stealing your intelligence. You have a citizenship problem.”
He wasn’t happy with my rejoinder and was somewhat fired up: “That you have followed the rules is not something that we should be grateful for. You have complied with your citizenship duties.” And my immediate thought was to share the figures of road traffic deaths in Iran, which are per capita among the worst in the world at 18,000 casualties annually, and then ask if he thought “following the rules” in that country was his serious recommendation. I didn’t muster the courage.
Yet someone who is viciously beaten, kept in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation to force confessions won’t feel the same. And if they fail to embark on a healing journey, it’s highly likely that, for the rest of their lives, they will fester with rage and revenge. Dancing to the TV footage of mourning rites in Mashhad, where thousands have filled the shrine of Imam Reza to grieve the loss of the “grand ayatollah,” is their natural response. They see justice being done to someone who they feel was personally in the interrogation cell.
To many members of Iran’s puritanical diaspora, who have long been carrying the remnants of regime-infused paranoia and internalized authoritarianism with them in their adopted countries, time in jail in Iran or the experience of torture are considered democratic credentials. They function as unerasable tattoos on the arm, signifying previous membership in that once-revered fraternity. If you cannot show the badge, you have already failed a critical test.
This has its roots in Iran’s Orwellian political culture, where rigorous tests of loyalty precede social privileges, professional opportunities and promotion. They can even define the context of family relationships within the ruling elite. If, for decades, guests on state TV and speakers at conferences began their remarks by saluting the eschatological Mahdi and paying tributes to the “memory of the martyrs,” it wasn’t because they deeply believed in those tenets.
They were signaling to the organizers and the higher-ups that they were trustworthy and “part of the tribe,” worthy of consideration for future opportunities. And they were making their case for not being excluded in a society where red lines have been perennially on the move, shifting arbitrarily and sometimes without consideration for previous proof of allegiance. When getting most jobs depends on observing unwritten norms and trying to take them to the next level, who would refuse to go along?
These practices have evolved into a zeitgeist, so they cannot be seen as isolated habits or necessary for survival in a theocracy. One of the common refrains that supporters of Iran’s former monarchy repeat to other freedom-loving Iranians is: “Say ‘Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’ so that you get used to it.” It is a thinly veiled threat issued to those who don’t address the son of Iran’s former shah with the right honorifics.
From my first interactions with the diaspora, I always found it odd that years of living in the world’s most robust democracy hadn’t reversed their tendency to practice surveillance and enforce uniformity. The first thing new arrivals to America often hear is to open their minds, refuse to judge, treat everyone with tolerance and disagree respectfully. Where have they been living all these years, then?
Even today, when the war of choice that exiled icons had long been imploring the U.S. and Israel to rubber-stamp has happened and their home country is on the brink, many diaspora Iranians are still busy policing social media posts, rallies, writings and past activity to make sure that nobody disagrees with the violent campaign that was set in motion to liberate the “proud people of Iran” — and that, if there’s an incongruous voice, it’s properly quashed.
Even Christiane Amanpour, one of the world’s most distinguished journalists, wasn’t spared. The Iranian-British-American CNN host and war correspondent has been viciously attacked because she did what any journalist is supposed to do: ask critical questions. At a Munich Security Conference panel on Feb. 13, on the heels of the nationwide protests, she asked Pahlavi why his supporters are so intimidating online, accusing everyone who doesn’t endorse him of being an apologist for the Islamic republic.
It didn’t take long before Amanpour herself became a target, and a torrent of abuse was unleashed against her on her social media, with the pro-monarchy online warriors calling her an Islamic republic spokesperson. At an Intelligence Squared event in London, a group of protesters approached her as she was about to leave the stage and hurled expletives at her. One of the individuals involved was an Iranian agitator who moved to Britain as a refugee.
Amanpour left Iran at 11 and may not have many vivid memories of her time there. But it is becoming increasingly clear that being Iranian or having Iranian ancestry adds a layer of difficulty for journalists whose work is already difficult. I left Iran in my late 20s and have inherited journalism as a family profession, which means that having to prove my credentials as a believer in freedom and democracy to someone who started living off activism a short while ago doesn’t feel like the most delightful task.
I have taken it for granted as a perk of my national origins that my past contributions and my future work may be gratuitously stripped of relevance, just as many other developments in our dark times are indiscriminate — like the bombing of an all-girls elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on Feb. 28 that killed more than 100 children. The same is true of the airstrikes that have substantially damaged Tehran’s Golestan Palace, a 15th-century royal complex of the Qajar dynasty and UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I was raised with an appreciation for Iran as an idea and a way of life. My parents didn’t instill blind nationalism in me, which is why, for example, the rites of the Persian New Year, Nowruz, were connected in my psyche with the renewal of nature. As a high school student, I teamed up with classmates who didn’t have anything but a love for Persian literature to organize a conference on the 800th anniversary of Rumi’s birth in 2007.
It started as an idea for a small event before we managed to secure a major auditorium in Rasht and host a larger gathering featuring a nationally recognized literary figure as speaker. We secured a generous contribution from a classmate’s father, whose business became an unofficial sponsor. He wanted to see his son and his friends do something that made them happy.
My parents hadn’t ever left Iran. And the principles they shared with me were not taken from any renowned curricular guidebook. They intuitively taught me that humans won’t be remembered for how hard we fought to prove others wrong, but by our ability to leave a legacy.
I see the current wrangling over the future of Iran as characterized by different stakeholders trying to prove the ruling establishment wrong. I suppose it has already been demonstrated to everyone that the Islamic republic is wrong, that it is morally hollow and that it has failed. But I don’t see anyone fighting to prove themselves right or at least trying to come across as the “good guy.”
In this battle to trounce evil, it seems that nobody is even pretending to be an angel. Years of misjudgment have culminated in a tragedy that is preparing to bury the rules-based order and international law. For years, three terms, robotically restated, have shaped policymaking around Iran in Western capitals: sanctions, downgrading of diplomatic relations and war.
Not a single passionate advocate of sanctions has volunteered to share evidence of how the Iranian government was weakened over decades of restrictions or how the Iranian people were empowered because of them and lived a better life. The sanctions were never smart or targeted. They were blanket bans on an entire nation, unlike the more targeted sanctions imposed on, say, Myanmar or Venezuela.
The Iran sanctions have always resulted in the further ostracization of a nation that didn’t deserve it. They have translated into impoverishment for Iranian scholars and artists, subject-specific denial of placement at international universities to bright students who could become leading scientists, and Iran’s name as a country not showing up in drop-down menus when you want to create a Yahoo! mail account. I organized an online campaign against that omission in 2007 until the ban was lifted.
Try to sign up for a Zoom account and select Iran as your country of residence — if you live there. You cannot find the name. You must select the name of another country where you don’t live.
Several countries also experimented with different forms of cutting off diplomatic relations — again, a measure that routinely punished Iranians while the government didn’t even care. Canada suspended its relations with Iran on multiple occasions before severing all ties in 2012 under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Iranian government didn’t feel the blow. Canada didn’t become a more relevant actor in Iran because of it.
North Korea hosts no more than 25 foreign embassies and has diplomatic missions in only 45 capitals. With such an insignificant global representation, there is no indication it’s nearing implosion, and it hasn’t been encouraged to tread an expedited path to democratization, either.
And then there is war. Last June, Israel launched unprovoked airstrikes on Iran in the middle of a diplomatic process between Iran and the U.S. Many Iranians in the diaspora celebrated, catching fellow immigrants from other communities off guard with the displays of schadenfreude toward suffering in their home country. A major infrastructural crisis ensued, and more than a thousand Iranians were reportedly killed.
And today, Israel is joined by the U.S. for another round of military aggression. Certainly, the clerical leader and key military figures have been killed. So were more than 150 people who died in an airstrike on an elementary school, most of them schoolgirls. And the Iranian Red Crescent Society has put the total Iranian casualty figure at 555 as of this writing. None of these civilians should have been killed. This is the cruelty of war.
We are now witnessing the apex of these failed experiments in what some world leaders and think tank advisers believe is a laboratory of state-building. The day after Khamenei was killed, Iranians weren’t at the Tehran international airport welcoming the arrival of their exiled leader — because he or she hadn’t shown up. Instead, the royal contender has now encouraged European countries to also join the war.
The war on Iran is an ideological battle in which moral boundaries have been breached unconscionably, and the sheer disregard for human life that’s on display is only one aspect of it. I am not seeing the angel showing us what the better version of Iran, as opposed to the reprehensible one presented by the Islamic republic, looks like. And frankly, I haven’t seen any such presentation for many years.
If Iran only needs to be invoked in the press when there is an emergency, a conflict, a nuclear talk or a crackdown, it is primarily because those who were responsible for telling the world about the better version of the country were distracted by other errands. They were marketing their personal brand, going after their opponents, binge-tweeting and not spending any time on reflection or self-enrichment.
If Iranian arts and culture have been glaringly missing from our newspaper pages and TV screens for so long, if Iran resurfaces to the headlines and everyone has heard something about it without knowing anything about its provenance as a civilization, and if the country’s dynamic civil society is acknowledged only when it is under visible repression, but not when it reels from marginalization, it is the outcome of a collective failure.
Journalism hasn’t done its job well, either, which is why American people are finding their government at war with a nation that they know has been consistently demonized but never properly introduced to them. We have rarely questioned if it’s possible that beyond the well-known tropes of nuclear programs, missiles and proxies, there are other snippets of information about Iran to read for. But it is also a failure of the Iranian diaspora, which urgently needs to engage in a new reflective process.
Beyond the dark images of stern clerics, their unappetizing rituals and their abusive vigilantes, what has the Iranian diaspora shown to the world about the Iran that exists, not the Iran that should exist or that is being remodeled in sparkly quarters of “Tehrangeles”? Everyone talks about the Iranian people and how fastidiously they are trying to support them. Who are these Iranian people, and where are they?
Two years ago, on March 1, my father, a veteran journalist, passed away at 57. As a local reporter, he was principled and fearless. When he was taken into custody for almost a week over giving interviews to the Persian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I was barely more than a child and don’t recollect how he was treated. My mother later told me that he was blindfolded and asked to write confessions on a paper, at the top of which was a line, taken from Shiite scriptures, that Iranian intelligence uses as an adage: “Salvation is in honesty.”
One of the last things he shared with me pertained to the history of New York City, something I didn’t know about even while living here. I am sure many people who frequent the James A. Farley Building, hosting the Moynihan Train Hall, are similarly unaware that there’s an entablature above the facade containing a poetic passage about postal workers — or that it has an Iranian origin. Opened in 1914, the building is the main intercity train hall in New York, but it used to host the headquarters of the U.S. Postal Service.
“It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed,” it reads. The engraved lines are taken from the English translation of a chapter on Persia in Herodotus’ “Histories.” It served as his tribute to the diligence of Persian messengers who relayed a note from the king of Persia, Xerxes I, to his people upon conquering Athens.
It is one of those anecdotes of the better version of Iran we haven’t tried to recount.
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