After the twelve-day war of June 2025, the Islamic Republic did not waver, but it changed its approach. Faced with ideological fatigue and a decreasingly mobilizable society in the name of the Islamic revolution alone, the regime now draws from a repertoire it had long fought against: that of ancient Persia. Behind the appearance of Cyrus, Persepolis, or national myths plays less a return to the past than a discreet admission: that an ideology alone is no longer sufficient to sustain the present.
The twelve-day war of June 2025 did not trigger the uprising in Iran that some envisioned from outside. It occurred over six months later. Meanwhile, in the days and weeks immediately following the final assault, this war produced something else: a national tightening, not around recommitment to the regime, but around the idea of a threatened Iran. Since the end of Israeli strikes, then American, power combined two reflexes.
The first was repressive with increased arrests, strengthened internal controls, executions for alleged espionage, and massive security deployment, especially in Kurdish regions. The second was symbolic and manifested in a visible effort to envelop the Islamic Republic in older, broader, and more consensual garments of the Iranian nation.
In this context, what many have described as a “nationalist resurgence” took shape. The word should be used with caution. It is not a popular rallying to the Islamic regime per se but a reflex of national defense exploited by the power.
The Iranian leadership understood that after the war, its strictly revolutionary, Shiite, and anti-imperialist vocabulary was no longer sufficient.
To speak to a society weary of ideology but still sensitive to national humiliation, it was necessary to draw from a repertoire older than 1979. Thus, symbols such as Cyrus, Persepolis, or other figures or places from ancient Persia surfaced in the public space and on social networks, often juxtaposed with Shiite symbols. Nationalistic displays flourished, while more secular-toned patriotic songs were heard even in religious ceremonies. The figure of Arash the Archer, a mythical hero of the Iranian imagination, was also mobilized in this new production. Even Ali Khamenei, whose regime had long been wary of Islamic exaltation, increasingly emphasized the “cultural and civilizational wealth” of Iran. In other words, a power based on the Islamic revolution has shifted, under the pressure of war and internal wear, to speak more the language of historical continuity in Persia.
This transition is politically significant because it contradicts part of the regime’s original program. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic was built against the Shah’s monarchic nationalism and the sacralization of pre-Islamic history. Its founding promise was not to restore the grandeur of Persia but to place Iran within the universal history of revolutionary Islam. The fact that the regime is now resorting to recycling Cyrus, Persepolis, or the Iranian heroic imaginary says less about its regained strength and more about its difficulty in continuing to govern solely through the mechanisms of Khomeinist Islamism.
To understand this shift, one must return to an essential concept of modern Islamist thought, especially Khomeini’s vision: that of jahiliyya. In classical Quranic vocabulary, jahiliyya refers to the “Age of Ignorance,” meaning the spiritual, moral, and political state of pre-Islamic Arabia dominated by idolatry, tribal loyalties, injustice, and human sovereignty over that of God.
20th-century Islamist thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, the theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood whose works were translated into Persian by Ali Khamenei before the revolution, significantly expanded this notion to make it an analytical category of the entire modern world. A society can be technologically advanced, administratively powerful, and militarily formidable, yet in this perspective remain submerged in jahiliyya if not ordered by divine sovereignty.
Khomeini tackled the problem of jahiliyya in Iran consistently with his radical Islamic vision. He subordinated and devalued the pre-Islamic Iranian glory, that of the Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanids, in favor of Islam as the sole legitimate source of grandeur and identity. In his view, Iranian history did not culminate with Cyrus and Darius but with Iran’s entry into Islam, then its unique contribution to the Muslim world, and finally with the Islamic revolution itself, presented as the restoration of authenticity after centuries of deviation.
In this perspective, jahiliyya is no longer just pre-Islamic Arabia. It can be extended to all non-Islamic history. Khomeini and the radical Islamists surrounding him thus treated pre-Islamic Iran as an age of ignorance, shadows, and idolatry, even though Zoroastrianism was not part of classical Arab polytheism. What mattered was not historical or theological precision, but ideological hierarchy. The ancient Persian empires were described as monarchical, oppressive, pagan or at least spiritually inferior, incompatible with authentic Islam. Imperial greatness, from this perspective, is worthless if not submitted to religious truth.
This hostility took on particular significance in the face of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s project. He had made ancient Persian history one of the pillars of his legitimacy. The grandeur of Persepolis in 1971 for the 2500th anniversary of the monarchy, the exaltation of Cyrus the Great, the attempt to start the official calendar from Cyrus rather than the Hijra, all of this was part of a coherent strategy to shift Iran’s symbolic center from Islam to the imperial continuity of Persia. For Khomeini, it was not just a cultural orientation. It was nationalist idolatry and a substitution device aimed at erasing Islam and Westernizing society under the guise of national greatness.
His critique was not just against the Shah’s choices, but more profoundly against the very idea of national pride based on pre-Islamic era. In his view, Iran’s true glorious history began with Islam’s arrival and the gradual conversion of Iranians. This shift, in his thinking, did not signify Persian humiliation but elevation. Islam had come to rescue Iran from jahiliyya, a stage in lower Iranian history characterized by monarchical rule, illusory civilization, and spiritual deviation.
The rejection of monarchy held a central place here. Khomeini viewed hereditary monarchy as fundamentally contrary to Islam.
In his view, the problem did not begin with the Pahlavis. It was older. Monarchy, whether Achaemenid, Sassanid, or modern, belonged to a corrupt power logic, alien to fair Islamic governance. He went even farther to present the 1979 revolution as the rupture destined to end millennia of royalty and dictatorship. Thus, the condemnation of the Shah was not simply a critique of his choices but a broader condemnation of dynastic principles themselves.
It must be noted, however, that this delegitimization of pre-Islamic Iran did not lead to a systematic destruction of its material heritage. At the beginning of the revolution, some extremist voices, like Sadegh Khalkhali, suggested destroying Persepolis or hurled insults at Cyrus. But Khomeini did not make the physical demolition of ancient ruins a major focus of his actions. The regime chose a subtler and often more effective path, preferring to devalue rather than destroy. The pre-Islamic heritage was diluted, minimized, or treated as secondary in education, media, and propaganda. The official national identity was refocused on Shiite Islam, the memory of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom, resistance to oppressors, and rejection of the secular West.
In summary, Khomeini did not deny the historical existence of ancient Persian grandeur. He relativized it, subordinated it, and eventually surpassed it. In his view, this grandeur belonged to a time of jahiliyya, a lower stage of Iranian history. Iran’s true glory resided in its Islamization, its contribution to the Muslim world, periods like the Safavid era where Iran’s Shiite identity was affirmed, and finally in the Islamic revolution itself, portrayed as the restoration of authenticity after centuries of deviation.
This is precisely why the period opened by the June 2025 war is so revealing. When a regime that built its legitimacy against the Shah’s pre-Islamic nationalism finds itself forced, after the twelve-day war, to reclaim some of these codes, it subtly admits to the relative exhaustion of its founding narrative. The Islamic Republic is not abandoning Islamism. It does not renounce the central role of political Shiism or the revolutionary matrix of 1979. But it now seeks to embed these aspects in something older and more emotionally mobilizing: Iran as a civilization and a historical continuity. However, this construction is based on a partial fiction. While Iran can claim exceptional historical depth, the political and strategic continuity with the great ancient empires is much more fragile than it seems.
For at least four centuries, Iran has only episodically been a shaping power. The Safavid dynasty, which unified the country in the 16th century and made it a Shiite state, was a foundational moment but still a relative exception in a history marked by fragmentation, dependence, and strategic marginalization. After their decline in the 18th century, the Iranian space entered a long period of instability, then weakness in the face of external powers, be it the Russian Empire, Great Britain, or later the United States.
In other words, the continuity between the Achaemenid or Sassanid Iran and contemporary Iran is more a political reconstruction than a historical reality. It resembles, proportionally, Egypt’s modern claim to the pharaohs. There is indeed memory, remnants, imagination, but no uninterrupted political thread or direct institutional transmission.
It is in this gap that the current regime’s strategy is situated. By mobilizing Persepolis, Cyrus, or the mythical figures of ancient Iran, the Islamic Republic does not resurrect a real continuity. It produces a narrative. A narrative intended to fill a void left by the erosion of revolutionary and religious language.
This recourse to the past is not a return to ancient greatness but a contemporary necessity. The more uncertain the present, the more the regime needs a stabilizing past. As its ideological legitimacy crumbles, it seeks a historical depth presumed to be unquestionable.
In this sense, today’s official Iran is not rekindling its imperial past. It is striving to create the appearance of a continuity that historically has been largely severed.
The paradox is striking. The regime, which had constructed its legitimacy against the Shah’s pre-Islamic nationalism, now, after the twelve-day war, finds itself having to reintegrate some of these codes. Not because it is suddenly converting to a pluralistic view of Iranian history, but because it knows that Islamic rhetoric alone is no longer enough to maintain loyalty. It is not truly celebrating ancient Iran for its own sake. It is instrumentalizing it to preserve the Islamic Republic in the face of diminishing legitimacy.
Therefore, the decisive question is not whether the regime has become nationalist, but why it has become more so. The answer lies in the post-June 2025 period and its extensions until now, at the end of March 2026. The war did not overthrow the regime; it weakened, exposed, and forced it to expand its symbolic base. More crucially, it opened a sequence of lasting tension with persistent military pressure, visible strategic vulnerability with the alignment of GCC countries, economic crisis exacerbated by extensive destruction, and unreconciled social distrust. In this context, the Islamic Republic still aims to be the heir of Karbala. But to endure, it must now also speak on behalf of Persepolis.
The months following the June war confirmed this shift. The regime simultaneously intensified its internal control and expanded its symbolic repertoire. On the one hand, increased repression, strengthened surveillance, constant reminders of revolutionary loyalty. On the other hand, a more insistent highlighting of the “Iranian civilization,” the nation’s historical depth, and its former role as a shaping power in the region. This coexistence is not contradictory but functional. It enables the regime to compensate for the erosion of its ideological legitimacy with a broader, less strictly religiously centered identity mobilization.
At its core, this is not a deep ideological transformation or doctrinal shift. The heart of the regime remains unchanged. The centrality of political Shiism, the reference to the 1979 revolution, the anti-Western stance, and the logic of religious legitimacy remain intact. Nothing in the regime’s structuring discourses indicates a renunciation of these foundations.
What we are witnessing is a strategic adaptation that has become more systematic since autumn 2025.
The regime is not replacing one narrative with another. It is superimposing. It is adding a national layer to an eroding Islamic foundation in terms of mobilization capacity. It is not becoming nationalist. It is becoming more national on the surface without ceasing to be Islamist in its depth.
This evolution responds to a simple constraint: governing a society that no longer entirely identifies with the rhetoric of revolution but still resonates with the idea of Iran as a threatened historical community.
However, memory is a radioactive substance. As we move towards 2026, this dimension becomes more visible. By mobilizing references like Cyrus or Persepolis instrumentally, the regime contributes to reintroducing them into the legitimate political imagination. These references are not neutral. They carry within them another possible definition of legitimacy, less exclusively religious, more civilizational, sometimes implicitly competitive.
In the short term, this strategy stabilizes. Over the long term, it can fissure. By broadening its narrative to survive the crisis opened by the June 2025 war, the Islamic Republic introduces elements that partially escape its control. It continues to speak in the name of Karbala. But the more it also speaks on behalf of Persepolis, the more it opens the possibility that one day, this second language will dominate the first.
The Khomeinist project was based on a strong, almost exclusive idea of revolutionary Islam, specifically political Shiism, providing all the resources of legitimacy, identity, and mobilization. It did not need nationalism. In fact, it was built against it, denouncing the Shah and his pre-Islamic cult as deceit and deviation.
However, this language is no longer enough. If it were sufficient, the regime would not need to resort to Cyrus, Persepolis, or the idea of a millennial Iranian civilization. The mere fact that it does signals something.
It is an admission of failure. The ideology does not disappear, but it no longer fully serves its mobilizing role. It must be complemented, nourished, expanded. And in the history of ideological regimes, this moment is always significant: it is when the doctrine ceases to be self-sustaining.
When a power begins to borrow historically rejected registers, it is almost never by pure choice but because something in its initial framework is no longer enough to sustain society.
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