‘Our pain hasn't been in vain:' how Iranians are creating a nation beyond the regime - oped

“Stand firm in what you believe, even if you must stand alone.” These words are etched into my baba’s gravestone.

We found them among his last notes, written in a hand already weakened by grief. He died in October 2022, exactly 40 days after the morality police killed Mahsa Jina Amini in Tehran. Her death triggered nationwide protests, unprecedented at the time, and they were met with a bloody crackdown from the regime. His heart could no longer take the pain.

On my flight back to DC from the Global Day of Action for Iran on February 14, called by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, and attended by over one million people, one sentence rumbled in my head: “Baba, I wish you were here to see that we are not alone anymore.”

Baba was a leftist through and through and twice a political prisoner, before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

During the Pahlavi era, when he was 18 or so, he was jailed for six months for possessing Marxist literature. He always laughed about how misguided his expectation of prison under Pahlavi was.

“I expected to be shackled to a wall in a dungeon. I was slapped a couple of times during the interrogations, but that was it. No shackles for me,” he chuckled, sipping tea in Tehran, reminiscing about those days.

Months before the Islamic Revolution culminated in 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi issued a message, “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” offering an olive branch to the nation and a path forward.

Fearing an Islamist takeover, Baba believed the nation should accept the Shah’s offer. However, millions of Iranians refused to listen, and world powers had different plans for Iran. The train of history had departed the station.

After the Revolution, Baba became an agitator and recruiter for a small leftist party that even engaged in rebellion against the regime in the jungles of Amol in 1982. The operation unraveled fast in the face of the revolutionary state that was still in its prime. A few months later, Baba was jailed again, this time for four years. Years that became a nightmare of mass executions and mass graves, against a backdrop of populist cheering and jeering. Baba survived the killings by sheer chance.

In June 1989, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died. His burial drew an estimated 10 million mourners. Baba and a small group of survivors from the Islamist purges gathered at our small apartment in Tehran and raised toasts in celebration, pouring one on the ground: “Here’s to our fallen comrades.”

I was born a few months later, and Baba washed his hands of politics. That slightly shifted in 1999, when university students rose demanding slight changes to press regulations and broader freedoms, and more so during the Green Movement of 2009.

During the Green Movement, he helped me, a 19-year-old junior university student, to organize rallies and train my peers about politics and security. He also helped me get through interrogations at the Intelligence Ministry.

We stepped in, not because we believed in the movement’s leader, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a regime insider who just wanted a seat at the table. We did what we could to do maximum harm to the Islamic Republic, capitalizing on the mobilization caused by the regime’s election fraud.

The Green Movement died down after a year, and the majority of the population went back to business as usual. I started working on LGBTQ issues in Iran under a pen name, and Baba focused on translating literature and political theory. We withdrew even further from mainstream politics in 2013, when 18 million Iranians voted for Hassan Rouhani, a conniving cleric shaped by the intelligence apparatus, who was marketed as a “moderate”. While much of the world applauded and commentators spoke breathlessly of “reform”, we refused to swallow the fantasy. We would not join the chorus insisting that Rouhani either possessed the will or the authority to moderate a system designed to resist moderation.

The nation doubled down on this delusion after Tehran signed a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015. Two years later, more than 23 million Iranians voted for Rouhani again. By this time, we had hung up our gloves. I was working in advertising and business journalism. Baba was settling down for retirement.

Then the Bloody November of 2019 happened. In response to mass protests after the overnight tripling of fuel prices, the regime cut the internet and killed at least 1,500 unarmed protesters on the streets.

I was back in the fray, from human rights documentation to wiggling my way into secretive missile bases to smuggling classified information out of the government and the judiciary. Unsurprisingly, those activities landed me in hot water, interrogation rooms, and threats. Eventually, I was left with no option but to flee Iran in 2021.

After leaving Iran, I was stationed in Eastern Europe with BBC Monitoring, where, in addition to my work as a journalist, I acted as a shofar, broadcasting evidence of state violence and protester courage during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022.

The work led to renewed threats from the Islamic Republic, this time delivered by a London-based regime affiliate. Security experts at the time warned me that with borders being porous in the region, I could easily end up in the trunk of a car and be smuggled back to Iran, a fate that other Iranian dissidents had already met.

Despite the violent crackdown and the presumed unity of the nation for regime change, in 2024, the state once again duped 16.3 million Iranians to vote for Masoud Pezeshkian as president, a political chameleon with no intention of delivering any form of meaningful change. When he took office, morality policing slightly eased and street concerts were held. Middle-class Iranians, at least some of them, appeared to be content with the cosmetic changes. Yet the clerical establishment could not even tolerate that. Surveillance and crackdowns resumed.

At the same time, the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and regional imperialist adventurism triggered the 12 Day War of June with Israel and later the United States, ending with the regime’s nuclear facilities and air defences buried under rubble. However, even that decisive kinetic action did not put an end to the malign behaviors and aspirations of the Islamic Republic. Paired with corruption and mismanagement, the combination led to Iran’s economy spiralling further into absolute chaos, making life increasingly unlivable for the average Iranian.

Choked with Islamist oppression and deprived of any chance to live even a semblance of a normal life, even in private, a month ago, millions took to the streets of Iran again. Ever since, tens of thousands of them have been slaughtered on the streets, in hospitals, in detention centers.

We have watched unimaginable atrocities unfold that have left each Iranian carrying at least one corpse — a father, a sister, a friend whose phone will never ring again; a loved one whose life was cut short so the Islamic Republic could draw breath for one more hour, one more day.

This is not just the story of my family and me. But all politics are, in the end, personal. Since the 1979 upheaval, more and more Iranians have started carrying deep wounds inflicted by the Islamic Republic, wounds that have turned into fertile grounds for seeds of rage and determination.

Some saw the true colors of the “unholy alliance of the Red and Black”, Marxism and Islamism, even before the inception of the Islamic Republic. They resisted and failed not because they lacked courage or grit, but because they were standing alone. Some dallied and required multiple rude and bloody awakenings from the regime. But the events of the past few weeks have created a rift in time. A sea of blood has separated the Iranian nation from the Islamist state occupying Iran. And there is no bridge back.

The pain we have collectively endured has not been in vain. It has been the birthing pains of a nation. Our national identity, what it means to be Iranian, was shattered after the Islamist takeover in 1979. For some, Iranian identity was reduced to nostalgia for a lost past. For others, even the pursuit of a national identity was out of question, seen as outdated and backwards. But in the furnace of this suffering, painted in the colors of Iran’s true flag, the Lion and Sun, Iran is being reborn. We are rediscovering patriotism. We are rediscovering unabashed collective pride not only in our past but in our shared vision for the future of Iran. And the shared pain, the shared emerging identity, is giving us a home, where we no longer are alone.

For years, for Iranians abroad, “Where are you from?” was a test, a moment of hesitation, of choosing which passport to show, which truth felt safest. And inside Iran, the question was harsher still: Will this ever change?

Now it has. Abroad, we say Iran without apology. With pride. With our heads held high. At home, our people stand knowing they have already altered their nation’s course. Whatever the coming days and weeks bring, one fact endures: Iran has emerged as a modern nation. The old shackles may rattle, but they no longer command obedience. The lion has risen — and it will not return to its cage.

Written by Khosro Isfahani - Director of Research at National Union for Democracy in Iran. Isfahani was born and raised in Tehran, where he lived for over three decades, working as a journalist and frontline human rights defender until 2021.