Two women with long hair are seen in profile with their hair covering their faces. Behind them are the buildings of a city.

The Islamic republic no longer controls the symbolic universe that once anchored its legitimacy.

By Menahem Merhavy
Research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a lecturer at Shalem College.

Foreign Policy

Iran is undergoing a profound transformation: one not of institutions or leadership, but of meaning. The Islamic republic continues to project strength through its security services and regional networks, yet it no longer controls the symbolic universe that once anchored its legitimacy.

In the last 15 years, Iranians have quietly constructed an alternative moral order rooted not in revolutionary sacrifice but in dignity, bodily autonomy, and truth-telling, including about the victims of the state. This bottom-up civil religion now challenges the core of the Islamic republic’s political theology more effectively than any party or organized opposition.

The shift did not happen overnight. It was built through a sequence of shocks that accumulated over time: the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan during the Green Movement protests in 2009, which transformed a protester into an unsanctioned national martyr; the mass killings during the nationwide economic protests of 2019; the execution of wrestler Navid Afkari in 2020, which underscored the regime’s indifference to public and international outrage; and the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022.

Each episode widened the gap between the regime’s sacred order and Iranian society. By the time protests erupted after Amini’s death, the state had lost the emotional authority to define who counts as a martyr, what is sacred, and what moral language could unify the nation.

The symbolic rupture has not receded, and this revolt of meaning is now one of the most consequential political developments in Iran. It has not toppled the Islamic republic and may not anytime soon, but it has reoriented the moral center of Iranian society in ways that will shape the country’s political future.

After the 1979 revolution, Iran’s rulers built their authority and governed through a powerful political theology that fused Shia martyrology, revolutionary mythmaking, and the memory of the Iran-Iraq War. The proverbial young martyr who gave his blood for the revolution became the state’s central icon. His image—haloed, pure, eternally youthful—filled murals, textbooks, and public squares. In this symbolic economy, the state defined the sacred, and society internalized it.

But the credibility of this system eroded, beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s. Corruption, inequality, and the widening gap between the revolutionary elite and ordinary Iranians made the state’s exalted moral language ring hollow. A younger generation with no memory of the war with Iraq, not to mention the Iranian Revolution, increasingly rejected the idea that sacrifice for the republic was a moral duty.

The rupture became visible in 2009, when millions of people took to the streets after a disputed presidential election. Iran’s security apparatus—namely the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the paramilitary Basij—relied on familiar methods of repression. But it could not control the symbolic fallout after the killing of Agha-Soltan, captured on a cellphone camera and spread instantly around the world. Within hours, protesters declared her the “martyr of freedom,” and she became a national symbol unsanctioned by the state. The regime’s monopoly on defining sanctity cracked.

This struggle over meaning intensified over the next decade. During nationwide protests in November 2019, security forces killed hundreds of people, many from poor and marginalized communities. Their families refused silence: Mothers recorded videos demanding justice for their children, and their grief resonated beyond provincial towns. A year later, the execution of Afkari, a wrestler widely believed to have been tortured into confessing to the murder of a security guard during 2018 protests, produced another martyr whose words—“If I am executed, I want you to know that an innocent person … was executed”—circulated like a national lament.

By the time Amini died in 2022, Iranian society had developed its own moral repertoire: Improvised shrines, candlelight vigils, and forms of mourning such as hair-cutting that coalesced in the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement that followed. That movement has since quieted, but its rituals, slogans, and moral vocabulary permeate everyday social life. Unveiled women remain visible in major cities such as Tehran, Shiraz, and Rasht, despite intensified policing, digital surveillance, and renewed so-called hijab laws.

The families of those killed during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement continue to hold public memorials that often turn into small-scale protests. Security forces often attempt to block access to cemeteries or arrest relatives, yet these gatherings—traditional ceremonies on the 40th day after death, birthday vigils, poetry readings—remain focal points of moral mobilization. University students still deploy symbolic acts that echo the language of 2022, including silent assemblies, refusal to segregate, and circulating protest poetry. On Persian-language social media, videos of local defiance spread rapidly, sustaining a transnational community of meaning.

The consequence is that the protest movement has shifted from the streets to a diffuse, persistent, and morally charged form of everyday resistance. The state has regained physical control but not symbolic authority >>>