Al-Qalam 
By Ayesha Omar
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel entered an illegal, immoral and reckless war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The decision was not compelled by necessity but by hubris: the claim to universal political legitimacy and the belief that non-compliant regimes could be dismantled by force. Even in Western criticism of the latter, the former persists, as a subtle colonial reflex; they read the present dangerous war with Iran as a deviation from modernity, from rationality, from some imagined norm of political progress. What is especially lost in this mode of analysis is a proper engagement with the theoretical underpinnings of Iranian revolutionary political thought, that which binds the intellectual architecture of its political order and sustains its durability. The Islamic Republic is a political formation with its own history, its own internal logic, and an intellectual genealogy that runs deeper than most Western commentary has cared to trace. Understanding what political Islam in Iran actually is, genealogically, conceptually, and historically, matters precisely because it is a system far more embedded than that which can be dissolved by any single intervention.
The revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah in 1979 was the culmination of decades of opposition to a regime synonymous with corruption, repression, and dependence on Western power. The Pahlavi state had been restored by the CIA and MI6-orchestrated coup of 1953, which removed the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It governed through the SAVAK secret police and systematically eliminated political opposition across the ideological spectrum. By the 1970s, nationalists, communists, Islamists, and liberal constitutionalists had converged not around a shared vision of what should replace the Shah, but around a shared conviction that his rule was illegitimate. The revolution was broad precisely because that illegitimacy was felt across class and ideology. It was also, as the scholar Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has argued in Revolutions and its Discontents (Cambridge University Press, 2019), the product of an ideologically plural intellectual formation, drawing on clerical jurisprudence, Marxist sociology, Third Worldist anti-colonialism, Shia theology, and Persian literary culture. To reduce it to a single ideology, whether called fundamentalism or theocracy, is to misread the intellectual history on which its institutions were built. Once the Shah fell, the question of which current would define the new order was settled, rapidly, by force. Two figures above all had shaped the intellectual terms of that contest: Ruhollah Khomeini, whose juristic reconception of clerical authority provided the revolution’s institutional architecture, and Ali Shariati, whose synthesis of Islamic theology and Third Worldist anti-colonialism gave it its most powerful popular idiom.
Khomeini and the juristic tradition
Ruhollah Khomeini’s central theoretical contribution was velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. This was not a return to tradition but a decisive rupture within it. Traditional Twelver Shia political theology had counselled quietism: during the occultation of the Hidden Twelfth Imam, the faqih might exercise limited delegated authority in judicial and social matters, but direct governance was another question entirely. Khomeini’s lectures at Najaf in early 1970, later published as Islamic Government (Hukumat-i Islami), made a radical claim: that in the Imam’s absence, the most learned jurist must not merely advise but rule, and that this was not an innovation but a recovery of Islam’s original political logic. However, no Shia thinker before him had explicitly argued that only senior clergy had the authority to govern the state nor the corollary that previous monarchies were illegitimate.
Khomeini’s intellectual formation was itself deeply layered. Trained in both jurisprudence and mysticism, he engaged philosophical traditions stretching back through centuries of Shia thought. The broader currents of twentieth-century Sunni political Islam also shaped the Iranian revolutionary milieu. A young Ali Khamenei, later to become Supreme Leader, translated the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb’s work into Persian in 1967. Qutb’s arguments for Islamic sovereignty and against both Western liberalism and Soviet communism were arguably absorbed and reworked within a specifically Shia and specifically Iranian framework.
What emerged was a peculiar and novel political architecture: juristic authority embedded over elected institutions, while retaining republican forms, elections, parliament, and presidency, that gave the system its claim to popular legitimacy. The 1979 constitution was not the codification of a pre-existing consensus but the political victory of one current within a plural revolutionary moment.
Shariati and the intellectual left of Islam
Ali Shariati represents a different strand of the revolution’s intellectual genealogy, no less important for having been partially absorbed and partially suppressed after 1979. A sociologist trained in Paris in the 1960s, Shariati worked at the intersection of anti-colonial theory, Marxist sociology, and Shia theology. He was the principal theorist of Islamic Third Worldism: the argument that Islam, properly understood, was a liberation ideology capable of articulating the struggle of the mostazafin, the oppressed, against imperialism, capitalism, and colonial modernity. The Quranic term mostazafin became his rendering of Frantz Fanon’s les damnés de la terre, the downtrodden, a concept he wove throughout his lectures and writings.
Those lectures, delivered at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran and later transcribed into some fifty pamphlets and booklets, captivated the educated youth of the 1960s and 1970s precisely because they refused the choice between secular modernism and clerical conservatism. His speech “Red Shiism/Black Shiism,” delivered in 1971, distinguished between the true Shiism of Ali, characterised by martyrdom, resistance, and agency, and the Safavid institutionalisation of religion as mourning ritual, a quietism that served entrenched power. He was openly anticlerical, deeply suspicious of the clerical establishment as guardians of an inherited Shiism that had evacuated its own emancipatory content. Shariati died in 1977, before the revolution he helped generate. His intellectual legacy was consequently available to be selectively appropriated. With Khomeini incorporated some of the political language of the mostazafin into populist addresses.
The entrenched structure of political Islam
What these two genealogies together illuminate is that political Islam in Iran is not a surface ideology imposed on an otherwise secular society, nor a medieval residue awaiting displacement by modernity. It is a form of modern political thought emerging from the region’s own reformation with unique intellectual contours. It is also a form of political organisation that has had close to five decades to embed itself in institutions, educational systems, military structures, and patterns of social life. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military organisation; it is the organisational embodiment of the doctrine that the revolution must be protected from within. The seminaries of Qom are sites where the political theology of the state is continuously reproduced, debated, and contested.
The ongoing intellectual debates within the Islamic Republic, about the scope of clerical authority, about the relationship between divine and popular sovereignty, about the role of religion in governance, are themselves evidence of how the system functions. None of this is to foreclose questions about the system’s past Islamic legitimacy or future survival. It is rather to insist that those questions can only be correctly purveyed on the basis of a serious account of what the system actually is. Political Islam in Iran is not an interruption of Iranian history but a chapter within it, one produced by specific intellectual formations, shaped by transnational currents of thought, and institutionalised across decades. It will not wither away through the logic of modernity, nor dissolve under the pressure of any single moment of conjuncture. Understanding it requires taking seriously what its architects actually thought and engagement with Iran can only proceed by recognising that only the Iranians get to choose who they want to be.
*Dr Ayesha Omar is a British Academy International Fellow at SOAS, University of London and a Senior Lecturer in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of The Pluralistic Frameworks of Ibn Rushd and Abdullahi An-Na’im (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
