Analyses of Iran’s political system often emphasize overt coercion: imprisonment, torture, executions, and episodic violence against widespread protests. These instruments are real and consequential. Yet an exclusive focus on repression obscures a more pervasive and durable mechanism of rule: the sanctification of political authority. The Iranian regime does not govern by force alone. It has cultivated a political environment in which obedience is experienced as moral intuition rather than contingent political choice. Through a dense network of religious institutions, ritual practices, and managed historical memory, political power is rendered sacred, dissent morally suspect, and compliance endowed with spiritual significance.
Religious institutions—from Friday prayer pulpits and neighborhood mosques to seminaries, Basij cultural centers, and state media—amplify narratives that sacralize authority. Friday prayer sermons, coordinated through weekly bulletins issued by the Office of the Supreme Leader, ensure nationwide thematic alignment, framing obedience as religious duty and dissent as ethical transgression. State-supported rituals during Muharram and Safar similarly weave political slogans into practices of mourning and devotion, fusing reverence for Shia history with loyalty to contemporary power. By embedding political ideology within familiar symbols and affective forms, the state encourages citizens to encounter compliance not as fear or calculation, but as a self-evident moral response—felt before it is consciously reasoned.
Because authority in Iran is deeply sacralized, dissent encounters constraints that extend beyond conventional repression. Political loyalty is embedded in ritual, affect, and everyday norms, shaping what is perceived as legitimate, intelligible, or ethically permissible. Resistance must therefore contend not only with laws and security forces, but with the symbolic frameworks through which legitimacy itself is apprehended. This embeddedness helps explain both the durability of the Iranian theocracy and the distinctive character of opposition within it—an opposition compelled to disentangle political critique from inherited moral meaning.
Sedimented Revolution and Institutional Memory
Hannah Arendt’s account of how contingent action becomes sedimented into durable institutions illuminates this process. For Arendt, political action is plural, unpredictable, and bound to specific historical moments. Yet when action is ritualized and repeatedly narrated, it can calcify into structures that outlast—and obscure—the conditions that produced them. What is lost in this sedimentation is not merely contingency, but plurality: the openness of meaning inherent in action itself.
In Iran, events such as the 1979 Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, and the consolidation of velayat-e faqih are continually re-narrated through sermons, commemorations, school curricula, and state rituals. “Sacred Defense” museums curate the war as a moral archive; schoolchildren visit exhibitions where teenage martyrs are presented as models of absolute loyalty and sacrifice. Over time, historically situated acts—revolutionary defiance, wartime endurance, clerical interpretation—are transformed into moral precedents. What began as insurgent action against authority becomes the justification for obedience to authority.
Revolutionary memory thus hardens into a religious-bureaucratic apparatus that organizes everyday life. Political authority appears not as a contestable outcome of struggle, but as an inherited moral order that precedes individual judgment. The plurality of revolutionary meaning is closed, replaced by a singular, state-sanctioned interpretation that equates fidelity to the revolution with fidelity to the regime.
Productive Power and Subject Formation
Michel Foucault’s account of modern power adds a further layer. In modern societies, power operates less through spectacular violence than through diffuse practices that shape what appears normal, sacred, or ethically desirable. The Iranian state’s religious discourse functions as a hybrid form of disciplinary and pastoral power, cultivating subjects who internalize expectations of piety, loyalty, sacrifice, and vigilance.
IRIB television dramas depicting pious soldiers, Basij-run Quran circles and charity initiatives, and university workshops promoting “Islamic thought” do not merely transmit ideology from above. They operate as normalizing practices, cultivating dispositions of reverence toward clerical authority and suspicion toward dissent. Power here works less by prohibiting action than by shaping the field of possible thought and conduct. Obedience comes to feel natural, while alternatives appear deviant, impious, or unintelligible.
This process should not be reduced to ideological manipulation alone. The state’s religious discourse does not simply impose beliefs; it organizes affect, habit, and ethical self-relation. Power operates not only through conviction, but through the moral terrain on which judgment itself takes shape. Subjects are produced not merely as obedient, but as ethically invested in the narratives that bind them to authority.
Moments of mass protest in Iran—such as those in 2009, 2019, 2022 and even most recent uprising in 2026—should be understood not only as reactions to repression, but as episodes of ethical rupture within a sacralized political order. These uprisings did not merely contest specific policies or instances of state violence; they unsettled the moral frameworks through which authority had long been apprehended as legitimate. Slogans, gestures, and acts of defiance signaled a breakdown in the affective and symbolic alignments that once bound obedience to piety. Repression in these moments functioned not simply as coercive containment, but as an attempt to reassert a collapsing moral grammar—one in which loyalty, sacrifice, and religious obligation had begun to lose their intuitive force.
Reification, Alienation, and Sacred Authority
Marxist critiques of reification and alienation illuminate another dimension of this process. Reification occurs when historically produced social relations appear as natural or sacred realities, no longer recognized as human constructions. In Iran, the state’s deployment of Shia symbolism transforms politically engineered equivalences—such as equating dissent with betrayal of Imam Hussein—into seemingly timeless moral truths.
Rituals of martyrdom, omnipresent iconography of the Supreme Leader, and the sacralization of conformity obscure situated power relations beneath the appearance of eternal obligation. Individuals are alienated not only from political agency, but from interpretive authority over the symbols that structure their moral world. Religious affect—grief, devotion, pride—is appropriated and redirected, binding ethical emotion to state power while foreclosing alternative meanings embedded within Shia tradition. Alienation here is simultaneously political, spiritual, and epistemic. Citizens encounter authority not as a product of collective action, but as a sacred object to which they are morally indebted.
The Basij and Everyday Discipline
The Basij exemplifies the convergence of sedimented memory, productive power, and reification in everyday life. As both paramilitary force and cultural institution, it embeds political discipline within ordinary social practices—organizing youth sports clubs, family workshops, Quran classes, neighborhood surveillance, and charity drives. Ideological loyalty is integrated into routine sociability, making conformity appear communal rather than coerced.
Participation is often ambivalent, shaped by social pressure, material incentives, or pragmatic calculation. Yet even strategic participation habituates individuals to environments in which loyalty is moralized and dissent socially isolating. Universities reinforce this terrain through compulsory ideological training, Islamized curricula, and tightly monitored student associations. These practices do not eliminate dissent; they structure the conditions under which dissent becomes morally fraught and epistemically suspect. Obedience is cultivated not as blind submission, but as ethical common sense.
Inversion and the Loss of Plurality
By fusing religious devotion with state loyalty, the regime estranges citizens from the interpretive plurality historically present within Shia life. What Marx described as the inversion of subject and object becomes visible: symbols once associated with suffering and resistance are transformed into instruments of authority. Political power becomes the sacred object, while the population—its source—appears passive or morally deficient. The state thus governs not only conduct, but the terms through which reality itself is interpreted. Ethical imagination narrows, contingency disappears, and alternative readings of tradition are rendered suspect or dangerous.
Comparative Perspective
Iran’s theocratic model contrasts sharply with other authoritarian systems. In Egypt, the state suppresses dissent while maintaining a formal separation between religious authority and governance. Institutions such as al-Azhar legitimate power and manage social order, but sovereignty is anchored in nationalism and security rather than theology. In Saudi Arabia, dynastic monarchy fuses with official Sunni Islam, yet religious authority supports rule without constituting its foundational source.
These contrasts underscore Iran’s distinctiveness: political authority is rendered legitimate through the theological centralization of sovereignty itself. Clerical interpretation becomes the medium through which power is naturalized, moralized, and sanctified.
Conclusion
Through the orchestration of ritual, institutional memory, media saturation, and everyday discipline, the Iranian state embeds political authority within the fabric of daily life. Compliance persists not simply because it is enforced, but because it is symbolically naturalized, historically legitimated, and religiously sanctified. Power endures by becoming moral intuition—reproduced through the very subjects it governs.
Beyond Iran, this analysis challenges secular accounts of authoritarianism that reduce legitimacy to coercion or ideology. Sanctified power operates through the moralization of political life itself. Where authority is embedded in ritual, affect, and memory, resistance must confront not only repression, but the ethical infrastructures through which power is lived, internalized, and reproduced.
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Nader Rahimi