Or has the compass merely changed hands?

In Iran, the question is no longer whether power can still coerce, but whether it can still mean.

On 19 December 2025, the Islamic Republic retains the material instruments that define a resilient security state: coercive capacity, surveillance, a regional network of partners and proxies, and the economic weight of para-state conglomerates. Yet a different layer of sovereignty has been slipping away: the authority to define the sacred, to nominate the martyr, to assign moral hierarchy, to monopolise the nation’s emotional vocabulary. A regime can endure for a long time once it has lost consent; it endures less comfortably once it has lost symbolic primacy.

Menahem Merhavy captures this shift with unusual conceptual precision: over roughly fifteen years, a bottom-up “civil religion” has emerged, not as a party platform, but as a lived moral order that reorganises the values through which ordinary life is interpreted. The regime’s traditional theologic-political grammar privileged obedience, sacrifice, and collective endurance in the name of God, Revolution, and Resistance. The counter-grammar privileges something else: dignity as inviolable (keramat), bodily autonomy as non-negotiable, and truth-telling as civic resistance. The point is not merely political liberalisation; it is a relocation of the sacred. The sacred no longer sits primarily in obedience; it sits in the person. In that sense, the removal of the veil in public becomes more than a tactic. It becomes a theological gesture: it asserts that sanctity has moved from the command to the conscience, from the ordinance to the self. (Merhavy, 2025).

This is why the slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi functions as a moral technology, not only as a protest chant. It compresses a full inversion of hierarchy into three words. “Woman” moves from being an object regulated by the state to the apex of moral agency; “Life” moves from being a resource expendable for transcendent goals to being a primary good; “Freedom” becomes less an imported ideology than the practical condition for truth, dignity, and bodily sovereignty to remain coherent. The Islamic Republic can repress crowds, arrest organisers, close venues, throttle the internet; it cannot easily re-occupy a symbolic universe once millions have learnt to live outside it.

The fracture did not appear in a single night; it accumulated through shocks that reallocated moral legitimacy away from the state. The killing of Neda Agha-Soltan in June 2009 created a martyr whose legitimacy did not pass through the state’s sanctifying apparatus; the video-mediated immediacy turned her death into an unsanctioned national sacrament. The fuel protests of November 2019, followed by the bloodiest crackdown in decades, further widened the gap between the regime’s claim to sacred guardianship and the population’s experience of violence and contempt. Reuters reporting at the time described the decision-making logic at the apex of the system: a security solution to a political and moral rupture, justified by the language of existential threat.

Navid Afkari’s execution in September 2020 worked similarly, because sport in modern societies is not merely entertainment; it is a civic stage on which honour, merit, and national pride are performed. When such a figure is eliminated by the state, the state inherits not reverence but moral suspicion. Human Rights Watch framed the case within a broader pattern of coerced confessions and due-process deficits, reinforcing the perception that the judiciary is not a dispenser of justice but a tool of domination.

The death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in custody in September 2022 then crystallised the moral conflict into a single axis: the state’s claim to regulate bodies versus the population’s claim to bodily sovereignty.

By 2025, the symbolic conflict persists in diffuse, ordinary forms rather than only in episodic uprisings: unveiled women in major cities; micro-memorials that periodically become gatherings; cultural performances that act as civic liturgy; and a daily, quiet refusal to “speak” the regime’s moral language. The state has adapted by changing the enforcement profile rather than the moral doctrine: it increasingly relies on indirect enforcement mechanisms, including monitoring and administrative penalties, to reduce the risk of escalation while preserving the formal norm. This adaptation itself is evidence of the deeper point: when coercion becomes too visible, it becomes counter-productive in a society whose moral compass has shifted. The regime must therefore coerce “prudently”, which is another way of saying it no longer governs the symbolic field with confidence.

The elite’s own rhetoric offers additional confirmation. When legitimacy is secure, the regime can afford theological maximalism. When legitimacy is fragile, it pivots to managerial themes (efficiency, anti-corruption, service delivery) and to alternative identity reservoirs. The recent embrace of pre-Islamic imperial symbolism is especially revealing: it is not merely nationalism; it is a search for an older, less contested sacrality. In November 2025, Iranian authorities unveiled a statue depicting the Roman Emperor Valerian kneeling before the Sasanian king Shapur I. Iran International and Amwaj documented the event as part of a broader turn toward pre-Islamic nationalism, framed as social mobilisation after major external shocks.

ISNA’s reporting likewise linked the concept to the post-war context and to the regime’s desire to produce a unifying narrative.

This is a strategic substitution: when revolutionary-theological symbolism no longer binds society, the state experiments with civilisational-national symbolism.

External actors are often invoked to explain moments of rupture in Iran: neighbouring powers, rival regional poles, Western influence, or covert operations. Yet their role in the current moral reorientation is best understood not as originary, but as accelerative and selective. They do not create the new moral compass; they shape the environment in which it stabilises, spreads, and acquires resilience.

Turkey represents a first, geographically proximate vector. Not as a moral model, but as a communicative hinterland. Its territory hosts segments of the Iranian diaspora, Persian-language media, and digital production ecosystems that operate beyond Tehran’s immediate coercive reach. In conditions of domestic censorship, proximity matters: narratives, images, and practices circulate through informal transnational circuits, returning into Iran via VPNs, encrypted messaging, and platform affordances. This does not amount to strategic authorship of Iran’s moral shift. It functions instead as amplification and externalisation of a discourse that is already endogenous, offering continuity of voice when the internal public sphere is intermittently suppressed.

Saudi Arabia’s role is even more indirect. The post-2023 de-escalation between Riyadh and Tehran has reduced the regime’s capacity to mobilise its traditional theology of siege and permanent external threat. When existential confrontation recedes, even temporarily, the symbolic economy of sacrifice and obedience loses urgency. In this sense, a less confrontational regional environment deprives the Islamic Republic of one of its most powerful justificatory frames. The effect is not ideological conversion, but narrative thinning: resistance remains a slogan, yet it no longer saturates everyday life with the same moral density.

The most structurally consequential external factor, however, lies elsewhere: in the governance of communication platforms and the algorithmic architectures that mediate visibility, imitation, and norm formation. This is not a question of content alone, but of selection, repetition, and scale. Algorithmic systems do not invent values; they decide which behaviours become normalised by exposure, which gestures become reproducible, which dissenting practices cease to look exceptional. A woman walking unveiled does not destabilise a regime because of her individual act; it destabilises it when that act becomes visible, iterable, and statistically ordinary.

Here the dynamics we analyse in our books on cognitive warfare and societal vulnerability become central. Platforms governed by engagement optimisation, moderation asymmetries, and opaque ranking logics inadvertently lower the cost of moral coordination. They allow dispersed individuals to recognise themselves as a majority before they are one politically. At the same time, they increase cognitive volatility: the same infrastructures that normalise dignity and autonomy can be exploited to inject polarisation, intimidation, or fatigue. The Iranian state has grasped this intuitively, shifting from blunt shutdowns to granular friction—bandwidth degradation, selective blocking, legal harassment—precisely because total disconnection is no longer sustainable once moral reference points have migrated online.

Crucially, none of this implies a puppeteer. There is no need to assume a unified external hand steering Iranian society. The transformation remains domestically generated. External actors, platforms, and algorithms act as force multipliers, not authors. They accelerate diffusion, harden identities, and sometimes distort trajectories, but they operate on a substrate already reshaped by demographic change, education, urban life, and repeated moral shocks.

Seen this way, the question is not whether Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, or technology companies are “behind” Iran’s moral shift. The question is whether the Islamic Republic can still seal its moral universe in a world where meaning circulates faster than authority. On that terrain, coercion retains efficacy; monopoly does not.

The question posed—does the North change, or does the hand holding the compass change—can be answered with a disciplined distinction. The North has changed insofar as moral sacrality has been re-anchored around the person: dignity, bodily sovereignty, and truth. Yet the more operationally significant change is that the hand holding the compass has changed: the population has seized moral initiative, and the state has been forced into reactive calibration. This is why Merhavy judges the phenomenon more dangerous than organised opposition: it empties institutions of meaning without needing to storm them. (Merhavy, 2025).

To understand why this moral reorientation could become structurally persistent, one must treat it as a demographic and cognitive process, not merely as political agitation. Iran’s urban transformation is one of the deepest drivers: the country’s urban population share, which was about 47% in the late 1970s, rose to the mid-70s percent range in recent years, producing an overwhelmingly urban social ecology in which daily life is negotiated through networks, education, work, and mediated culture rather than through village hierarchies and clerical intermediation. World Bank data and peer-reviewed work on Iranian urbanisation converge on this basic trajectory.

Urbanisation changes the “unit of moral life”: honour and conformity become harder to police when anonymity, mobility, and plural micro-communities multiply.

Digital penetration reinforces this. At the start of 2025, internet penetration in Iran was reported at 79.6% (Datareportal, 2025).

A security state can censor, throttle, and intimidate; it struggles to prevent the formation of alternative moral publics once a large majority is habituated to mediated comparison and narrative competition. Education adds further pressure: UNESCO-linked World Bank indicators place youth female literacy in Iran at extremely high levels by international standards, which matters because literacy is not only a skill; it is a multiplier of agency, aspiration, and cognitive autonomy.

 These structural shifts also illuminate a second layer of your draft: the transformation of the Pasdaran from a revolutionary militia ethos into a politico-economic establishment. The IRGC was created in 1979 by decree under Khomeini as a parallel force to safeguard the revolution, counter-balancing the regular military and consolidating control over internal threats (Britannica; Brookings).

Over time, it became a major political-economic actor; credible reporting and scholarship consistently describe its deep reach into strategic sectors and its ability to shape market outcomes through both formal and informal power. The exact percentage of economic control varies across estimates, and serious sources typically present ranges rather than a single figure; even within mainstream summaries, the estimates span from around 10% to above 50%.

What matters analytically is not the precise point estimate, but the political consequence: an organisation born as the guardian of a moral revolution is now widely perceived as a beneficiary of monopoly, privilege, and impunity. When guardians become rent-extractors, the moral contract dissolves. Moral rebellion then ceases to be a fashion of the educated urban youth; it becomes a judgement on the regime’s claim to justice.

The rural pillar also deserves a more precise formulation than the common cliché of “traditional countryside versus modern city”. The revolution invested heavily in rural infrastructure, and scholarship on redistribution and welfare suggests that rural poverty declined sharply in the early post-revolutionary period; for example, Salehi-Isfahani’s work reports a large reduction in rural poverty between the late 1970s and the early 1980s under specific poverty lines, indicating that the regime did indeed buy legitimacy through redistribution and basic services

 But the long-run effect of development is often moral pluralisation: roads, schools, electricity, and media access do not merely improve welfare; they weaken isolation, increase expectations, and expand comparative horizons. The regime’s original rural-revolutionary sociology was therefore self-consuming: the very modernisation that consolidated power in the 1980s contributed, over decades, to the cognitive conditions for moral autonomy.

Against this background, political renewal at the top appears less as the driver and more as the response. President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration (sworn in July 2024) operates under the structural constraints of the system and under the shadow of the Supreme Leader and security institutions; recent reporting shows the government managing high inflation, subsidy reform, and sanction pressure, while preserving core power instruments and red lines.

 In other words, “renewal” functions primarily as tactical adaptation: reduce provocation, emphasise competence, shift rhetoric, adjust enforcement visibility. None of this directly restores symbolic monopoly. It may delay acute rupture; it does not reverse the moral reorientation described above.

A compact conclusion follows. The moral change in Iran is overwhelmingly a societal phenomenon, produced by cohort replacement, urbanisation, mass education, and digital habituation, and then accelerated by repeated episodes in which the state lost the authority to define the moral meaning of death, sacrifice, and truth.

Political actors are adjusting pragmatically—through indirect enforcement, managerial rhetoric, and nationalist-symbolic substitution—but these are symptoms of the underlying shift, not its cause.

The North has moved, and the compass has been taken: the Islamic Republic can still rule bodies; it no longer rules the sacred map by which many Iranians interpret their lives.

That is why the struggle is not simply over policy. It is over the right to name what is holy.

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