In response to/My reading of Amir Bagherioromi latest piece on Iran in the Daily Maverick.
There is a particular kind of liberal writing on Iran that mistakes moral longing for political analysis. It performs concern while evacuating history; it invokes “civilisation,” “crossroads,” and “revolt” while refusing to name power, empire, sanctions, or the material conditions that structure life and resistance in the country. The result is not solidarity, nor critique, but a kind of ideological lullaby — soothing to Western liberal sensibilities, useless to anyone actually living under pressure.
The problem is not that Iran is described as complex. It is complex. The problem is that complexity here functions as a rhetorical escape hatch. Everything is acknowledged, nothing is explained. We are told Iran is more than a theocracy — true but banal. We are gestured toward “civilisational depth” — a flourish that substitutes poetry for politics. What is never confronted is how this so-called crossroads is produced: by decades of sanctions warfare, economic strangulation, regional destabilisation, and the constant external demand that Iran perform liberal respectability while being denied sovereignty.
This is not analysis. It is liberalism’s dream of Iran — an Iran that wants what liberalism wants, in the form liberalism recognises, on a timeline liberalism finds comfortable.
Absent is any serious engagement with how sanctions discipline everyday life, hollow out wages, reorder class relations, and intensify authoritarian reflexes. Absent is any account of how protest is shaped not just by morality or generational desire, but by inflation, fuel pricing, labour precarity, and geopolitical siege. Absent, too, is any reckoning with how Western liberal discourse consistently frames resistance only when it mirrors its own self-image — secular, polite, legible, NGO-ready.
Instead, we get yearning. A cry for a liberal Iran that might finally resolve the West’s unease: modern but not antagonistic, rebellious but not anti-imperial, cultured but governable. This is not writing about Iran; it is writing through Iran, using it as a screen on which liberalism projects its unresolved fantasies.
To say that Iran is “not reducible to a theocracy” is not wrong. But to stop there is an abdication. It refuses the harder task: explaining how political theology, state violence, sanctions, class struggle, and regional imperialism are mutually entangled. It refuses to ask why liberal democracies so often demand democratic outcomes abroad while practising economic warfare that makes them structurally impossible.
What we are left with is a politics of vibes — earnest, humane-sounding, and fundamentally inert. A prose that reassures the reader that they care, without requiring them to understand or take responsibility for anything.
Iran does not need liberal permission to be complex. It needs analysis that does not flinch at power — including the power that writes these essays.
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Ali Ridha Khan
The Architecture of a Crisis Manufactured by Hostile Foreign Powers.
An exclusive exposé on the hidden forces, intelligence networks, and propaganda machinery fueling turmoil in Iran.
https://felixabt.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-a-crisis-manufactured
Ali’s intervention is sharp, eloquent, and written from a place of deep political concern. That, in itself, is something I respect. But I think his critique ultimately misreads both my argument and the political stakes of the moment in Iran.
Let me be clear at the outset: my writing is not an appeal for liberal validation, nor an attempt to translate Iran into a form legible to Western comfort. It is an attempt to grapple with a society in motion, under strain, and in revolt against a political order that has lost moral authority over large parts of its own population. That is not liberal fantasy. It is observable reality.
The central problem with Ali’s response is that it replaces one reductionism with another. Where he accuses me of evacuating history, he collapses agency. Everything becomes sanctions, empire, and Western power. These are real forces, and I have never denied their role. But when they are treated as total explanations, they cease to be analysis and become absolution.
Sanctions have undoubtedly distorted Iran’s economy, deepened inequality, and intensified authoritarian reflexes. But they cannot account for the systematic erosion of human dignity in everyday life. They do not explain why ordinary citizens are denied the right to live without constant surveillance, fear, or arbitrary punishment. They do not explain the criminalisation of basic civic freedoms, the suppression of peaceful expression, or the insistence that private life itself be regulated by the state.
To suggest otherwise is to flatten lived experience into geopolitics.
Ali argues that my reference to civilisation, memory, and historical depth substitutes poetry for politics. I would argue the opposite. Ignoring civilisational memory is precisely how politics becomes abstract and detached. Iranian resistance today does not emerge only from inflation or fuel prices, though those matter deeply. It also emerges from a long historical consciousness of dignity, continuity, and moral legitimacy. Iranians know when a political order has overstayed its ethical claim. That knowledge is not liberal. It is historical.
The charge that I refuse to name power is puzzling. Power is named throughout my argument, but it is named in plural. State violence matters. Sanctions matter. Imperial histories matter. But so does internal domination. So does the reproduction of power through clerical authority, security institutions, and enforced conformity. To speak only of external power while remaining silent on internal coercion is not radical clarity. It is selective vision.
There is also an uncomfortable implication in Ali’s critique: that Iranians must frame their resistance primarily in economic or anti-imperial terms to be taken seriously. That if their demands centre bodily autonomy, cultural expression, or personal freedom, they are somehow performing liberalism rather than politics. This, to me, is deeply patronising. It mirrors the very Western gaze he claims to reject, one that only recognises resistance when it fits a predetermined ideological script.
This moment in Iran is not about liberalism. It is about evolution. About a society renegotiating the relationship between faith, power, identity, and the state. About a population that has lived through revolution, war, isolation, and sacrifice, and is now saying that the costs are no longer justified by the outcomes. That is not “saying nothing”. That is saying something profoundly dangerous to entrenched power.
Finally, the suggestion that acknowledging complexity produces political inertia misunderstands the purpose of the piece. Complexity is not an escape hatch. It is a refusal to lie. Iran cannot be understood through a single axis of blame or redemption. Any analysis that insists otherwise, whether liberal or anti-liberal, risks becoming ideological comfort food.
Iran does not need fantasies projected onto it, Western or otherwise. But neither does it need its people reduced to mere effects of sanctions and empire, stripped of voice, choice, and historical agency. To insist on that is not solidarity. It is another form of erasure.
Progress, in Iran as elsewhere, has never been linear, pure, or externally sanctioned. It has always been contested, uneven, and internally driven. That is the argument I made. I stand by it.