Artist: Ahmad Barakizadeh
By Kayhan Life Staff
On the night of July 4th, after a suspicious 22-day disappearance, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei emerged from his bunker to attend the Ashura mourning ceremony at his private Husseiniyeh — perhaps to mourn the martyrs, or perhaps to check which of his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders was still alive.
It turned out that most attendees from the previous year were absent this time— courtesy of a 12-day Israeli airstrike campaign that thinned the ranks of the Islamic Republic’s inner circle. In their place was an unmistakable sense of political panic.
Khamenei did not speak. Instead, he asked his eulogist to perform “O Iran,” a patriotic anthem — a rare cultural detour for a regime that has spent decades removing the word “Iran” from its official vocabulary in favor of “ummah-friendly” branding. The regime is now desperately leaning on national symbols to inspire loyalty. When theology fails, nationalism becomes plan B.
In the early years, the Islamic Republic declared war on symbols of Iran’s pre-Islamic past, viewing them as relics of paganism. Even Nowruz, the millennia-old Persian New Year, was barely tolerated. The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution even went so far as to rename Yalda Night and Chaharshanbeh Suri in the state calendar— presumably to ensure no one accidentally enjoys themselves.
Khamenei’s Nowruz address last year was a masterpiece of erasure: not a Haft Sin in sight, not a flicker of Iranian heritage. For a regime that constitutionally mandates all laws be vetted by Islamic criteria (Article 4) and requires its president to be a Shi’a Muslim (Article 115, with no mention of Iran), this sudden wave of patriotic symbolism seems less like a change of heart and more like a lifeboat.
After all, Khamenei’s vision of unity has always extended beyond Iran’s borders. “We must form an Islamic nation,” he reminded ambassadors last year, not an Iranian one. Brotherhood, solidarity, and transnational ideology are the real passport stamps of the Islamic Republic. Iran? Merely the launchpad.
Now, when ideology has failed and the public wants him gone, the Supreme Leader has to hum a nationalist tune — awkwardly and off-key.
The same system that tried to erase Iran is now hiding behind it.
