Iran: Can Cyrus save Khomeini?

The twelve-day war of June 2025 did not provoke the uprising in Iran that some outsiders imagined. It produced something else: a national tightening, not around a renewed support for the regime, but around the idea of ​​Iran under threat. As soon as the Israeli and then American strikes ended, the authorities combined two reflexes. The first was repressive: increased arrests, executions for alleged espionage, massive security deployment in the Kurdish regions. The second was symbolic: a visible effort to wrap the Islamic Republic in the older and more consensual clothes of the Iranian nation.

It is in this context that what many have described as a “nationalist surge” took shape. The word deserves to be handled with caution. This is not a popular rallying to the Islamic regime as such, but a reflex of national defense exploited by those in power. The Iranian leadership understood that after the war, its strictly revolutionary, Shiite and anti-imperialist vocabulary was no longer enough. To speak to a society tired of ideology, but still sensitive to national humiliation, it was necessary to draw on a repertoire older than 1979.

The Return of Cyrus

Images of Cyrus the Great, Persepolis and other figures from ancient Persia have reappeared in public spaces, often juxtaposed with Shiite symbols. Patriotic songs with a secular tone were heard even in religious ceremonies. The figure of Arash the Archer, mythical hero of the Iranian imagination, was mobilized in this production. Even Ali Khamenei insisted more on the “cultural and civilizational wealth” of Iran. A power based on the Islamic revolution began, under the pressure of war and internal attrition, to speak the language of Persian historical continuity.

This shift is politically significant, because it contradicts part of the regime’s original software.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been built against the monarchical nationalism of the Shah and against the sacralization of the pre-Islamic past.

Its founding promise was not to restore the greatness of Persia, but to reinscribe Iran in the universal history of revolutionary Islam. The fact that power today recycles Cyrus or Persepolis speaks less of its rediscovered strength than of its difficulty in continuing to govern with the sole means of Khomeinist Islamism.

To understand this shift, we must return to the notion of ignorance. In classical Koranic vocabulary, it designates the “age of ignorance”, the moral and political state of Arabia before the Islamic revelation, dominated by idolatry and the sovereignty of men in place of that of God. Twentieth-century Islamist thinkers, notably Sayyid Qutb, whose works were translated into Persian by Ali Khamenei before the revolution, expanded this concept into a category of analysis of the modern world as a whole.

Khomeini dealt with this problem in Iran in a manner consistent with his radical Islamic vision. He subordinated and devalued pre-Islamic glory, that of the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids, for the benefit of Islam as the only legitimate source of identity. In his reading, Iranian history does not reach its fulfillment with Cyrus and Darius, but with Iran’s entry into Islam, and finally with the Islamic revolution itself. Pre-Islamic Iran is thus treated as an age of darkness, monarchical domination and spiritual misguidedness.

The battle of history

This hostility took on particular relief in the face of the project of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had made the ancient Persian past one of the pillars of its legitimization. The splendor of Persepolis in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the exaltation of Cyrus the Great, the attempt to start the official calendar from Cyrus rather than from the Hegira: all this was part of a coherent strategy aimed at moving the center of symbolic gravity of Iran from Islam towards Persian imperial continuity. For Khomeini, it was nationalist idolatry and a device intended to erase Islam under the guise of national greatness.

It should be noted, however, that this delegitimization of pre-Islamic Iran did not result in a systematic destruction of its heritage. Some extreme voices proposed demolishing Persepolis, but Khomeini chose a more subtle path: devalue rather than destroy. The pre-Islamic heritage was diluted and minimized in education, media and propaganda, while official national identity was refocused on Shiite Islam, the memory of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein and the rejection of the secular West.

It is precisely for this reason that the moment opened by the war of June 2025 is so revealing. When a regime born from the denunciation of the cult of Cyrus begins to recycle Cyrus, Persepolis or Arash to rally the population, it implicitly admits the relative exhaustion of its founding story. The Islamic Republic is not abandoning Islamism. She now seeks to embed it in something older and emotionally mobilizing: Iran as a civilization and as historical continuity.

This construction is, however, based on a partial fiction.

Because if Iran can claim exceptional historical depth, political and strategic continuity with the great ancient empires is fragile.

For at least four centuries, Iran has only occasionally been a structuring power. The continuity between Achaemenid Iran and contemporary Iran is less a historical reality than a political reconstruction, similar, all things considered, to that mobilized by modern Egypt when it claims to be pharaohs.

By mobilizing Persepolis or Cyrus, the Islamic Republic is therefore not resuscitating real continuity. It produces a story intended to fill a void, that left by the erosion of revolutionary and religious language. The more uncertain the present, the more the regime needs a stabilizing past. The more its ideological legitimacy crumbles, the more it seeks to lean on a supposedly incontestable historical depth.

The paradox is striking. The regime which had built its legitimacy against the pre-Islamic nationalism of the Shah finds itself forced to recover part of the codes, not by conversion to a pluralist reading of Iranian history, but because it knows that Islamic rhetoric alone is no longer enough to maintain adherence.

Bend to hold

Fundamentally, this is not a profound ideological transformation. The heart of the regime does not change. The centrality of political Shiism, the reference to the 1979 revolution, the anti-Western matrix and the logic of religious legitimacy remain intact. What we are witnessing is a strategic adaptation. The regime does not replace a narrative by another: it adds a national layer to an Islamic base which is eroding in terms of mobilizing capacity. It does not become nationalist. It becomes more national on the surface, without ceasing to be Islamist in depth.

However, memory is radioactive material. By mobilizing references like Cyrus or Persepolis, even in an instrumental way, the regime helps to reintroduce them into the legitimate political imagination. However, these references carry within them another possible definition of legitimacy, less exclusively religious, more civilizational, sometimes implicitly competing. In the short term, this strategy stabilizes. In the longer term, it may crack. By expanding its narrative to survive the crisis opened by the war of June 2025, the Islamic Republic introduces into its midst elements which partially escape its control. The more she speaks in the name of Persepolis, the more she opens the possibility that one day, this second language will take precedence over the first.

The Khomeinist project was based on a strong idea: revolutionary Islam, and more precisely political Shiism, should alone provide all the resources for legitimacy and mobilization. He even stood against nationalism, denouncing the Shah and his cult of the pre-Islamic past. But this language is no longer enough. If it were enough, the regime would not need to go after Cyrus. The simple fact that he does so is already a signal.

It is an admission of failure. Ideology does not disappear, but it no longer fully fulfills its mobilizing role. It must be completed and expanded. And in the history of ideological regimes, this moment is always significant: it is the one where the doctrine ceases to be self-sufficient. When a power begins to borrow registers that it had historically rejected, it is never by pure choice, it is because something, in its initial system, is no longer enough to hold society together.