Have a look at the photo above, a billboard recently spotted in Tehran. The red slogan in the center, :تا جهان بیاساید , is the Persian translation of the English words, “Until the world finds rest.”1 The missiles say:
شهید امام خامنهای — “Martyr Imam Khamenei”
به یاد دختران میناب — “In memory of the girls of Minab”
شهید طهرانی مقدم — “Martyr Tehrani Moghaddam”
شهید حاجیزاده — “Martyr Hajizadeh”
شهید قاسم — “Martyr Qasem”
جهان بدون ظلم — “A world without oppression/injustice”
#نه_به_ظلم — “#No to oppression/injustice”
انتقام — “Revenge”
درس عبرت — “A lesson.” (Or “an object lesson” or “a warning”)
Note the themes of martyrdom, redemptive struggle against injustice, and the rectification at the end of history. These are a quintessentially Shiite triad. But the militarization of this triad is distinctively Khomeinist.
“UNTIL THE WORLD FINDS REST” are the most important words on the billboard, and they’re doing enormous theological work. They’re ominous enough on the face of it, but far more so in the context of revolutionary Shia eschatology. The world is restless because injustice reigns, and injustice reigns because the enemies of God and righteousness prevail. The world will only find rest when the Mahdi—the “Rightly Guided One”—returns at the end of history, vanquishing evil and ushering in Islamic rule. The billboard is, therefore, an exhortation to struggle in a conflict that is both cosmically necessary and inevitable. The current war, it suggests, belongs to a struggle that ends only with the eschatological consummation.
“A world without oppression/injustice” is another significant phrase. The Persian-Arabic word ظلم (zulm) is richer than the English word “oppression.” It denotes the state of the world under illegitimate rule, which it has been, or so Shiites believe, since the battle of Karbala in 680 CE—the pivotal confrontation in Islamic history, when the Umayyad army massacred Husayn ibn Ali and his small band of followers. The word zulm connotes tyranny, moral disorder, usurpation, things where they don’t belong.
In Shia history, the paradigmatic zulm is the usurper—the tyrant who rules against God’s moral order, who wrongs the Prophet’s family, and persecutes the just. Within this symbolic world, resistance to zulm is a sacred duty. The Islamic Republic uses this word to describe Israel, the United States, hostile Arab states, and internal dissidents. We are embodiments of zulm.
“Down with Israel” has a specific theological significance. For Khomeneists, Israel’s destruction is an eschatological goal, not just a geopolitical one, because Israel’s destruction is the precondition for the Mahdi’s return. Similarly, انتقام (revenge) refers to the cosmic settling of accounts that will precede the restoration.
Note the way recent events are folded into the symbolic order of Karbala. For Shia, martyrs aren’t dead. They testify. Their blood speaks. The blood of the girls of Minab speaks, as Husayn’s blood is said to do. Dead children are testimony against ظلم, confirming the righteousness of the cause. The juxtaposition of the Minab girls with the “Epstein Island Victim Girls” is quite theologically precise: For Khomeneists, America isn’t merely the great usurper, it’s also the great corruptor, the emblem of sexual licence and moral subversion. The Epstein saga is proof of this. There is an implicit argument here: “They exploit their girls. We avenge ours.” Similarly, naming weapons for martyrs connects the military project directly to the drama of Karbala. The missiles continue the martyrs’ testimony, proving that the shahids didn’t die for nothing. Their names are literally aloft, soaring toward Israel.
Tehrani Moghaddam was the father of Iran’s long-range ballistic missile project. He was killed in 2011 in a not-so-mysterious explosion at an IRGC military base. Moghaddam’s finest protégé, Major General Amir Ali Shahid Hajizadeh, was killed in June 2025, when Israel struck his underground IRGC command center. Together, the names are a lineage—a martyrological chain.
“Free World,” of course, is a term from the West’s Cold War vocabulary. The phrase is held at arm’s length, here, with visible contempt. In Khomeneist eyes, this term is one of the most successful pieces of Satanic propaganda ever devised: a slave order that calls itself freedom, a corrupting power that calls itself liberation. Putting those words on a missile destined for Israel is a taunt, obviously, but it’s also a theological rebuttal. By placing the words alongside their Farsi translation جهان بدون ظلم—“a world without oppression”—the billboard says: “You call yourselves the Free World. But we’re going to show you what a world without oppression really means. It will arrive on this missile.” The actual free world—جهان بدون ظلم—is precisely what the Mahdi will inaugurate upon his return. Your “Free World” is the reign of ظلم. Ours is what comes after.
The inverted red triangle is a Hamas symbol: It indicates something marked for destruction. The hashtag before #نه_به_ظلم (“#No to oppression/injustice”) is a sardonic allusion to Western social media culture and the digital vocabulary of liberal activism (#BringBackOurGirls, #StandWithUkraine). The implication is that the Great Satan has seduced the world into thinking that by typing a phrase into a phone, it can rectify injustice. Our انتقام, this says, is rather more concrete.
The authors of the text on the billboard obviously have a sense of their Western audience. They imagine that they’re speaking to us directly, in our own idiom. We’re meant to understand it. But of course, we don’t. No one in the West pays this kind of thing the slightest bit of attention, and this the strangest aspect of our long conflict with the Islamic Republic. For 47 years, it has made its beliefs and its goals unambiguous. What’s more, the behavior of the regime has been consistent with what it claims to believe. But the West just refuses to take any of this seriously. In all of the reporting you’ve seen on this war, have you seen even one article discussing the Mahdi? I haven’t.
It’s as if, during the Cold War, we simply refused to believe that our adversaries were communists, refused to read a word of Marx, and never once considered that Soviet leaders might be serious about building a socioeconomic order based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Imagine trying to figure out what Stalin was doing without understanding the concepts of historical materialism, class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party, or the laws of revolutionary development. Imagine insisting that Bolshevism was just a decorative vocabulary draped over ordinary Russian nationalism, or a kind of theatrical language no one was meant to take literally.
We never talked ourselves into such stupidity. We understood that Marxism-Leninism was not incidental to the Soviet project; it was the project. You didn’t have to think that Marx was right to grasp that the men in the Kremlin believed he was, and to grasp that this was essential to understanding their behavior.
But this is exactly the error the West keeps making with the Islamic Republic. We strain to explain its conduct in the terms modern Western elites find respectable: deterrence, regime survival, Realpolitik. Yes, all of those things matter. Iran isn’t exempt from strategic calculation. But the leaders at the core of the Islamic Republic are fused to something else: a theology of history, a cult of redemptive suffering, a metaphysical understanding of injustice, and a set of eschatological expectations that aren’t peripheral to their behavior, but the motivation for everything they do.
Khomeinism isn’t a cynical veneer over an otherwise conventional state. Certainly, yes, some actors in that regime, perhaps many, are disillusioned and cynical. But not all of them. Khomeinism instructs the Islamic Republic’s elites, particularly the IRGC, in the meaning of history. It teaches them that the longed-for redemption of history will emerge, and can only emerge, through struggle, catastrophe, and blood.
To ignore all of this isn’t sophistication. It’s just smug illiteracy. The ideological universe the regime inhabits may be unfamiliar, but it’s not inaccessible, particularly now that machine translation and AI have collapsed the language barrier. You can learn the basics, for free, from this volume of speeches and writings by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Islamic Governance, published in 1970, is to the Iranian Revolution what The Communist Manifesto was to the Russian Revolution.
His treatise has been incorporated into the Islamic Republic’s constitution. From the preamble:
… In the flow of its revolutionary evolution, our nation was cleansed of the dust and rust of the reign of decadence; it cleansed itself of the intellectual alien impurities. It returned to the authentic Islamic worldview and intellectual positions. Now it is determined to establish its exemplary model society (iswa) based on Islamic criteria. On these bases, the constitution’s calling is to actualize the ideological premises of the uprising and to create conditions where one can be raised with the exalted universal Islamic values.
With respect to the Islamic content of the Iranian Revolution, which was a movement for the victory of all the oppressed people over their oppressors, the constitution prepares the ground for continuing this revolution at home and abroad. Specifically, it strives to expand international relations with other Islamic movements and people in order to pave the way for the formation of a single, universal community, in accordance with the Qur’anic verse, “Verily, this Brotherhood of yours is a single Brotherhood, and I am your Lord and Cherisher: therefore Serve Me (and no other)” (21: 92), to also assure that the continuous struggle for the emancipation of the deprived and oppressed nations of the world is strengthened.
… In establishing and equipping the defense forces of the country, the focus shall be on maintaining ideology and faith as the foundation and the measure. Consequently, the Army of the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Pasdaran Revolutionary Corps are formed in accordance with the aforementioned objective. They will undertake the responsibility of not only guarding and protecting the borders, but also the weight of ideological mission, i.e. striving (jihad) on the path of God and struggle on the path of expanding the sovereignty of the law of God in the world; in accordance with the Qur’anic verse: “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies” (8: 60).
Americans are having a noisy debate about the conduct and wisdom of our war in Iran, and rightly so. But the solipsistic and impoverished quality of this debate is disheartening. We seem to think the regime’s theology is irrelevant and its propaganda is some kind of kitsch. The Islamic Republic’s ideology should be central to our analysis. Because it is not, we insist on negotiating with its leading figures as though they were technocrats from Brussels. Then, absurdly, we’re surprised when they do exactly what they’ve been saying—slowly, loudly, and for nearly half a century—that they intend to do.
Martyrdom, the Schism, and the Imam
A particular religious story, central to Shiism for fourteen centuries, is the organizing principle of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy, military doctrine, and understanding of its own historical purpose. To make sense of the regime’s behavior, we need to know this story, because it makes the regime’s behavior not only intelligible but, in its own terms, inevitable. In the eyes of the regime, its confrontation with Israel and the United States represents the unfolding of a divine plan whose shape has been known to Shiites for over a thousand years.
The central drama of Shi’ism is Imam Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala. Karbala is the paradigmatic revelation of the truth about this world, and that truth is that the righteous are often outnumbered and defeated. Truth is stifled. The righteous are called to suffer, witness, and die rather than submit to illegitimate rule. Terms like شهید (“martyr”), ظلم (“oppression,” “injustice,” and “wrongful domination”), انتقام (“revenge” or “vengeance”) are all part of this Karbala-saturated symbolic order. Suffering, in this worldview, is not absurd; it plays a key moral role.2
The Sunni-Shia schism was, fundamentally, about succession: Who would lead the community after the death of the Prophet, in 632 CE? For Shiites, the answer was the Prophet’s family, beginning with Ali. This is the line of Imams—divinely guided figures, living proof of God’s continued involvement with humanity.
According to Twelver belief, the twelfth Imam was a child when, after his father’s death in 874, God placed him in occultation—hidden from the world, though still alive. For a time he communicated through trusted deputies; then he passed into a deeper concealment that, believers hold, continues to this day. He will return at the End of Time as the Mahdi. For 1,150 years, a significant portion of humanity has been organizing its spiritual life in anticipation of his eventual return.
The story of the Twelfth Imam, therefore, begins in catastrophe and opens onto hope. The child who should have inherited the mantle of sacred authority doesn’t ascend a throne, lead an army, or found a dynasty. He is first hidden but still dimly accessible, then hidden altogether, absent from the eye, but not from the world. He’s Schrödinger’s Imam: gone and not gone, lost and not lost, dead to ordinary history but alive to divine time. His return will be preceded by chaos, injustice covering the earth, and specific prophesied events—including the destruction of a Jewish polity.
What gives the story of the 12th Imam its emotional force is that it turns bereavement into a form of faithfulness. Long before the Twelfth Imam entered occultation, his followers had learned to see history as a record of betrayal: the Prophet’s house displaced, his heirs hunted, humiliated, and murdered. Their grief was not born from a single catastrophe alone, but from the sense that justice had been denied again and again, until absence itself became the signature of the sacred.
Shiʿism is, therefore, a tradition steeped in memory of dispossession. The Occultation gathers all of that sorrow into a single image: justice hasn’t died; it has gone underground. The Imam is hidden because the world is unworthy of him; history is an age of eclipse. The Imam is absent, but not defeated. He remains the latent guarantee that injustice will not have the final word. To live as a Twelver is to inhabit a spiritual mood that is at once mournful and expectant—to grieve, to endure, to wait.
The world, in this telling, is not simply unjust; it is out of joint because its rightful guide has been taken from view, withheld by God from an age too brutal, too corrupt, too blind to receive him. We live, in this vision, in an interlude: a long twilight between betrayal and restoration.
This arcane theological history matters urgently right now. We are in a war whose origins and logic are, in most of the world, misunderstood.
The Revolution Within the Revolution
It is critical to grasp that the mainstream Shia clerical response to the Occultation was political quietism. If you don’t realize this, you might mistake Khomeini for a familiar type. He is not. He’s a radical innovator within his own tradition, a true revolutionary.
A distinctly Marxist influence on his doctrines arrived, inter alia, through the figure of Ali Shariati, a revolutionary sociologist from a clerical family, educated in Paris, who called for a “Red Shiism” that actively struggled against oppression, as opposed to the “Black Shiism” of mourning. Khomeini’s ideas belong firmly to the 20th century. It is impossible to make sense of them absent the context of modernity and the West.
Every bit as much as Lenin, Khomenei envisioned himself as the leader of a global revolution. If Lenin concluded the revolution would be advanced by a proletarian vanguard, Khomenei concluded it would be advanced by a Shiite vanguard. In 1989, Khomeini sent Gorbachev a letter. It is a remarkable document. He tells Gorbachev that communism is exhausted and Islam will fill the void. It reveals the genuinely universalist, world-historical scope of his vision.3
Traditional Shi’i scholars concluded from the Occultation that precisely because the true Imam was absent, religious authorities should stay out of politics. Don’t mistake any worldly ruler for the hidden one. Don’t try to hasten what God will bring. Wait. Purify. The Grand Ayatollah Sistani—still alive, still in Najaf, still the most authoritative Shia cleric in the world—is a living embodiment of the quietist tradition. He has consistently refused to claim political authority, even as Iraq collapsed around him. The contrast with Khomeini couldn’t be sharper.
Khomeini’s revolution was as theologically radical as it was politically radical. To understand it, you have to understand a theological tension in premodern Twelver Shi’ism: If the rightful Imam is absent, how much should clerics rule? Wilayat al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) is Khomeini’s answer to the question. In the Imam’s absence, the most qualified jurist should rule. That jurist’s authority is divinely sanctioned, and what’s more, it is necessary.
The Islamic Republic is no mere theocracy, in this view. It’s a placeholder for the hidden Imam. This means Wilayat al-Faqih isn’t just a political theory. It is an eschatological vision. The clerical state will be the vehicle for creating the conditions for the Mahdi’s return, and it derives its legitimacy from this role. Khomeini didn’t just politicize Shi’ism, he eschatologized politics, turning the state itself into an instrument of End Times theology. In doing so, he repurposed all of Shi’ite history to galvanize a revolution and legitimize a revolutionary state, transforming the Occultation from an age of tragic waiting to one of militant guardianship, ideological mobilization, and state-building.
Although its theology assigned martyrdom a central place, classical Shiism venerated suffering and steadfastness. Under Khomenei, the Islamic Republic transformed martyrdom into an engine of revolutionary political mobilization. During the Iran-Iraq war, a visual and ritual aesthetic of martyrdom took shape—it involved posters, murals, funeral iconography, operation names, missile dedications, mass rites. All of this taught a moral: Death, in the proper cause, is holiness. This form of holiness was nationalized and bureaucratized.
Shia devotional life has always emphasized avenging Husayn. But the Khomeneist interpretation of Shi’ism converted a tradition of redemptive suffering into a doctrine of redemptive violence. The word انتقام (“revenge,” “vengeance”) is central. Vengeance, in this view, is literal, military, nationalistic, and immediate.
VS Naipaul’s Among the Believers remains the most extraordinary description of Iran after the revolution. What he captured brilliantly was the psychological dimensions of this—the way revolutionary Shi’ism offered its adherents a total explanation of history and a heroic role within it. His portrait of the mostazafin (the dispossessed) finding cosmic dignity in Khomeini’s framework is still unsurpassed in English. (His 1998 follow-up, Beyond Belief, is worth revisiting too: by then, he’s seeing the contradictions and disappointments more clearly.)
The rhetoric of endless struggle “until the world finds rest” reflects this worldview. So do the missiles on the billboards. Missiles lend themselves especially well to this symbolic world because they descend from above with retribution, and they can be displayed like relics, or icons. They’re perfect for a regime that fuses anti-imperial grievance with eschatological promises and a martyrdom cult.
The Satan Theology
To grasp why the regime is so focused on Israel—or on Jews, more properly, because it doesn’t really distinguish—we need to understand what it means when it speaks of the Great and Little Satan. The Great Satan-Little Satan discourse is widely quoted and poorly understood.
Shaytan, in Islamic theology, is not the horned figure of Christian imagination. He is, primarily, a corrupter and deceiver: He is the one who whispers, who leads the faithful astray from the straight path. His weapon is seduction, distraction, the introduction of fitna (discord and corruption) into the umma.
When Khomeini called America the Great Satan, it was a theological diagnosis. The danger of America wasn’t primarily military; it was cultural and spiritual. Hollywood, consumerism, sexual freedom, and secularism were Satan’s instruments for luring Muslims away from Islam. The Shah was Satan’s local instrument; he was Westernizing Iran, corrupting its youth, replacing Islamic values with American ones.
Israel is the Little Satan not because it’s less important, but because it operates at closer range. It is, for Khomeini, a Western colonial implant in the heart of the Islamic world, corrupting the Palestinians, desecrating Jerusalem, functioning as America’s forward base for spiritual subversion. The phrase “Little Satan” is sometimes misread as meaning Israel is secondary, but within this theological logic it means Israel is the proximate corrupting agent, the one whose physical presence in the Islamic world is the most immediate wound.
This framework explains why the regime seems almost more agitated by Muslim leaders who normalize relations with Israel than by Israel itself. The Abraham Accords were evidence of successful Satanic corruption. The rage at Sadat after Camp David, and his subsequent assassination, likewise belongs to this logic.
Jewish Corruption Theology
The Satan framework rests on an older substratum of Islamic anti-Jewish theology that predates Khomeini by centuries. There is a strand of Quranic interpretation—not universal in Islam, but present and available—that portrays the Jews of Medina as the original munafiqun (hypocrites), who pretended to accept Islam while working to undermine the Prophet from within. This is a very different charge from the Christian deicide accusation. It’s not that the Jews killed the Prophet, it’s that they corrupted his community through deception and intrigue. The theological profile is, again, Satanic in the Islamic sense: not frontal assault but subversion, infiltration, rot from within.
Khomeini drew on this tradition extensively. In his reading of Jewish history, Jews had always functioned as agents of corruption within Muslim societies—not as a race (he was careful, usually, about the distinction) but as a theological community defined by its rejection of and enmity toward Islam. This distinction matters but in practice dissolves, because the Khomeneist view is that Judaism as practiced necessarily produces this corrupting function. Israel is therefore not a normal state with objectionable policies; it’s the institutionalization of an anti-Islamic theological project.
The Legacy of the Nazis
The Islamic Republic’s antisemitism is also, in some measure, imported, and imported from the most catastrophic source imaginable. Astonishingly, Adolf Hitler was once believed to be the Twelfth Imam.
Both for strategic reasons and out of genuine ideological affinity, Nazi Germany assiduously cultivated Tehran. In 1935, in a gesture to the new Germany, Reza Shah changed the country’s name from “Persia” to “Iran,” explicitly invoking its Aryan identity.4 Nazi engineers, technicians, and propagandists, present there in large numbers, cultivated Iranian intellectuals and officials, published political materials, and ran Persian-language radio broadcasts. They translated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Persian, making a specific vocabulary about Jewish power available to Khomenei and his successors. If the theological claim says Jews corrupt Islam as a religious matter, the conspiratorial claim says Jews control world events as a political matter. The two claims reinforce each other powerfully, producing something more dangerous, and more totalizing, than either alone.
The German historian Matthias Küntzel, working in the tradition of Jeffrey Herf, has done interesting work on this period.5 Like Herf, Küntzel argues that modern Islamist antisemitism is not merely traditional Islamic anti-Jewish theology; it is qualitatively different, a product of the encounter with Nazism. The claim cuts against two comfortable notions simultaneously: the first says that Islamist antisemitism is purely a response to Israeli policies; the second that it’s merely traditional Islamic theology. Küntzel says it’s neither: There’s a specific historical moment of contamination that explains the genocidal intensity. The Islamic Republic’s obsession with Jews, fed by reinforcing streams, is an overdetermined hatred.
Küntzel is a useful but not uncontroversial source; some scholars think he overstates the Nazi influence and understates the indigenous Islamic roots. But there is broad agreement that the encounter with Nazi ideology in the 1930s and 40s intensified, and qualitatively changed, the region’s anti-Jewish thought. For those inclined to think, “Surely this is just about Israel’s policies, about Palestinian rights, about occupation”—no. The roots go deeper and stranger than that.
The Chaos Doctrine
This is the part most journalists miss entirely. Within Khomeneist ideology (and especially in its most developed expression, in the IRGC’s ideological wing), the return of the Mahdi is preceded by a period of cosmic upheaval—fitna on a global scale. Crucially, the destruction of Israel is explicitly linked, in this framework. to the preconditions for his return.
In Khomeneist eschatology, chaos is the sign of the Mahdi’s imminent return. This means that catastrophic losses—dead schoolgirls, destroyed cities—aren’t arguments against the project; they’re confirmation of it. Every atrocity is evidence that indeed, the world is filled with tyranny, and the worse it gets, the more certain the return is near. This is what makes this regime resistant to rational-actor analysis. Within its own logic, losing badly is not a reason to stop.
Khamenei, the now-late Supreme Leader, was more circumspect publicly, but the IRGC’s Quds Force very much operates within this framework. The “Axis of Resistance”—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis—makes far more sense when you understand it as an eschatological project, not just a geopolitical one.
This isn’t peripheral. It’s in Khomeini’s own writings. It has been elaborated by figures like Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi (Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor, sometimes called “Professor Crocodile”) into a fully accelerationist theology. Chaos isn’t to be avoided, it’s to be welcomed, and it is to be deliberately hastened.
Mesbah-Yazdi deserves far more attention in Western coverage than he received. He was the most intellectually rigorous and ideologically radical of the post-Khomeini clerical thinkers, and his influence—particularly on Ahmadinejad and on the hardline IRGC factions—was enormous. A systematic theologian of the End Times, he drew the conclusions Khomeini left implicit. If the state exists to prepare conditions for the Mahdi’s return, and if the Mahdi’s return will be preceded by global chaos and the destruction of Israel, then pursuing chaos and the destruction of Israel is not merely permissible, it is obligatory. Similarly, the confrontation with the United States is part of a divinely ordained narrative that must be driven forward.
Most Khomeneist thinkers maintained a productive ambiguity—the republic has elections, the jurist has ultimate authority, and the tension between these is managed. Mesbah-Yazdi had no patience for the ambiguity. He argued explicitly that popular sovereignty is shirk, a form of idolatry, the attribution to humans of authority that belongs only to God. This put him at odds even with figures like Rafsanjani and Khatami, but it’s consistent with a pure eschatological logic: If the Mahdi’s return is the telos of history, anything that entrenches human authority is an obstacle.6
The Hojjatieh Society is relevant here, too, though the picture is murky. This semi-secret organization, founded in the 1950s to combat Baha’ism, developed an extreme Mahdist theology. Ahmadinejad was rumored to be a Hojjatieh member. His public statements about “preparing the ground” for the Mahdi’s return, and his infamous 2005 UN speech—he said he was accompanied by a “halo of light” that silenced the audience—weren’t just bizarre, they were eschatological code.
The practical consequence of this strand of thinking is what makes it so significant for understanding the current war. If you believe that the current chaos is the divinely ordained prelude to the End, a catastrophic military defeat can be seen as sacred suffering, martyrdom on a civilizational scale. This is not a framework that responds to deterrence in the way Western strategic theory assumes.
The Guardians of the Revolution
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is constitutionally and self-consciously the guardian of the revolution’s ideological purity. Khomenei distrusted the regular Iranian army, Artesh; he created the IRGC in 1979 as an explicitly ideological force. Its members swore loyalty not to Iran-as-nation-state, but to the revolution and Wilayat al-Faqih. This has had institutional consequences. The IRGC has its own seminaries, publishing houses, and theological training programs. Its officers are expected to be ideologically formed, not just militarily trained.
Qasem Soleimani, before his assassination in 2020, was remarkably open about the theological dimensions of his work: He was building a network of linked militias, encircling Israel, as a front for the final confrontation. In speeches saturated with Mahdist imagery, he described this “ring of fire” in terms that map directly to the prophesied events preceding the Mahdi’s return.
The IRGC’s paramilitary volunteer force, the Basij, is where the ideological formation reaches its most intense expression. The cult of martyrdom that the Basij cultivates goes back to the Iran-Iraq War, when teenage boys were sent across minefields wearing what were said to be the keys to paradise around their necks. This was one of the most important ways Khomeini transformed the Shia theology of martyrdom into a military doctrine. Shahadat (martyrdom) should be sought, not merely borne, because it guarantees the martyr’s place in paradise and advances the revolutionary project simultaneously. This has direct implications for how the IRGC calculates acceptable losses. The calculus may look irrational to Western strategic thinkers, but it’s internally coherent.
Pragmatists versus Purists
The Islamic Republic is not a monolith of apocalyptic true believers. There has always been a tension between revolutionary Islam as a political project in this world (implying a state that can make rational-actor calculations, sign treaties, seek sanctions relief) and revolutionary Islam as an eschatological mission (which operates on a different temporal horizon entirely, one in which worldly defeat is meaningless). The genius and the danger of the Khomeneist system is that it institutionalized both simultaneously.
Iranian political scientists (and Iran has produced excellent ones, many now in exile) speak of two roughly stable factions within the system: the osulgarayan (principalists, or fundamentalists) and the eslahtalaban (reformists), with a significant pragmatist center that shifts between them. But this maps imperfectly onto the eschatological/non-eschatological divide, because many so-called pragmatists accept the overall ideological framework while simply disagreeing about tactics.
Hashemi Rafsanjani was the great example of the pragmatist pole. He was a genuine revolutionary—he was there at the beginning, he was deeply committed to the Islamic Republic—but he consistently argued for maslaha (expediency, public interest) as the operating principle, rather than ideological purity. He established the Expediency Council for precisely this reason. He was politically marginalized in his final years, which tells you something about where the institutional balance of power had shifted.
The nuclear deal of 2015 represents the high-water mark of pragmatist influence. Rouhani and Zarif argued—successfully, for a time—that Iran could advance its interests through negotiation and sanctions relief better than through confrontation. Khamenei permitted it but never fully endorsed it; his famous statement that he was “neither for nor against” the deal was a deliberate ambiguity.
The collapse of the JCPOA after Trump’s 2018 withdrawal was a catastrophic defeat for the pragmatists, and Raisi’s election in 2021—brought about partly by the Guardian Council disqualifying reformist candidates—represented a decisive institutional shift toward the principalist-eschatological pole. It’s possible that the current war is obviating the tension that remains, forcing a choice. The institution most likely to determine which side wins that argument is the IRGC, which was built from the ground up to be the guardian of the eschatological vision.
The pragmatists who remain in the system—and there are some, in the foreign ministry, in the technocratic apparatus—will be making exactly the arguments that Rafsanjani would have made: that survival of the system requires tactical accommodation. The eschatological hardliners will be arguing that this moment is precisely what the revolution was for. Which voice prevails in that internal argument, which is probably happening now in Tehran, under the bombs, is right now the most important political question in the world.7
With Khamenei dead and his son Mojtaba either elevated, dead, or in occultation himself, the internal balance now is a black box. Mojtaba is even less known than his father was before the revolution. He’s been associated with hardline positions and with the IRGC’s political networks. But succession crises sometimes produce strange outcomes. If he’s alive, he may feel pressure to demonstrate control by reining in the most extreme elements, or he may feel he needs to prove his revolutionary credentials by doubling down. He is inheriting this system at its most extreme moment of crisis. What does he believe? Which tradition within this ideological lineage does he represent?
Nobody in the West really knows.
Now
When we look at Iranian behavior in this conflict—the closure of the Strait, the attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure, the willingness to absorb catastrophic military punishment—does it look more like the behavior of a rational actor seeking to optimize its strategic position, or like the behavior of an institution that believes it is living through prophesied events? The question itself—which almost no Western coverage is even asking—changes everything about how we understand what is happening.
Why would a regime facing existential military pressure not seek de-escalation? The rational-actor model predicts accommodation. But for the ideological core of this regime, the current moment may look less like catastrophe than like confirmation, even fulfillment. The chaos, the fires, the confrontation with “Global Arrogance”—within this eschatology, that’s not a mistake. It may be the point.
We’re now hearing from almost every quarter that Iran posed no threat to us, that Israel is overreacting, that diplomacy was working. These are dangerous misunderstandings. The regime has said, with great consistency and considerable precision, what it believes and what it intends. But our policy makers and news media have failed, over 47 years of news coverage, adequately to explain what this means. This is not a trivial failure.
Our journalistic incentive structure is part of the problem. Editors want sources who speak English fluently and can be quoted on deadline. Scholars who can actually read the primary Persian material are few, often academic and not mediagenic, and not always available. The think-tank analysts who are available have been trained in the rational-actor tradition and translate everything into it. Western foreign policy analysis is so thoroughly marinated in realist IR theory—states pursue interests, interests are material, material interests are negotiable—that ideological frameworks which genuinely mean what they say are systematically discounted. It’s almost a reflex: When a regime says something that sounds irrational, Western analysts translate it into something rational. The eliminationist rhetoric about Israel becomes “a bargaining position.” It isn’t dishonesty so much as trained incapacity, a paradigm so dominant it makes certain things literally difficult to see.
Meanwhile, a significant strand of Western progressive thought has developed a worldview in which any radical movement emerging from a formerly colonized society must be understood primarily as a response to Western actions. This is sometimes illuminating and more often catastrophically distorting. Applied to Iran, it produces a reading in which everything—the antisemitism, the eschatological violence, the eliminationism—is fundamentally about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, or American imperialism, or the legacy of the 1953 coup.8 The indigenous ideological roots, the theological framework that precedes and exceeds any particular political grievance, become invisible. For those schooled in this way of thinking, it is verboten to take the regime’s theology seriously, on its own terms. It smacks of orientalism.9 The irony is that it’s precisely the reverse: refusing to take the theology seriously denies the regime’s own account of itself.10
There is also the sheer inconvenience of what this regime believes. “Diplomacy would have worked, the JCPOA was working, regime figures aren’t serious” is a psychologically comfortable position, and the alternative is deeply alarming. If the regime means what it says—if the eschatological framework is real and operational—then the implications are terrifying and the policy options are genuinely difficult. There’s a human tendency to prefer the analysis that makes the world more manageable. But if the analysis is wrong, it only makes it more manageable temporarily.
Those who insist that this war is pointless are making an analytical error that the eschatological framework clarifies. They are assuming that we are responding to a political threat: a state with grievances that could, in principle, be addressed, boundaries that could be negotiated, security concerns that could be mutually acknowledged. But what we are actually facing is a theological project in which Israel’s elimination is not a negotiating position but a religious obligation and an eschatological precondition. Israel’s elimination is to be followed with our conversion to Shi’ism or our destruction. You can’t overreact to an existential theological enmity by taking it seriously.
The Islamic Republic has not concealed its worldview. It has emblazoned it on constitutions, sermons, missiles, and billboards. The mystery here is not what the regime believes. The mystery is our resolute refusal to believe the regime.
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