Why fall of Ayatollah would neither mean liberalism nor revival of Zoroastrianism for Iran – Firstpost
As Iranians pour onto the streets and the Islamic Republic responds with brute force, the world watches with a mix of horror and misplaced hope. Official figures from Tehran put the death toll from the nationwide crackdown at around 2,000. Critics and human rights groups estimate the number may be much higher, with one placing it closer to 12,000.
Amid this bloodshed, a familiar fantasy has returned to liberal discourse, both in the West and in Bharat: that Iran is on the cusp of shedding Islamism, reviving its pre-Islamic identity, and perhaps even longing for the “good old days” of the Shah.
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This is not just naïve. It is dangerously ignorant.
The idea that the Shah’s Iran represented some golden age of liberalism is a carefully curated myth, largely constructed through an American strategic lens. Strip away that lens and view the period from Bharat’s perspective, and the illusion collapses quickly. There was nothing benign, let alone admirable, about the Shah’s regional posture, especially from the standpoint of Bharat. In fact, the Shah of Iran was among the most consistently anti-Bharat leaders in Asia during the Cold War.
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The Shah’s Iran was the first country to recognise Pakistan on August 14, 1947, and in May 1950 the two signed a treaty of friendship that laid the foundation for a deeply strategic alliance. This relationship would later translate into concrete military and political support during moments critical to Bharat’s security.
During the 1965 Bharat-Pakistan war, for instance, Tehran openly sided with Islamabad, with an Iranian Foreign Ministry statement accusing Bharat of “aggression against Pakistan”. When Islamabad struggled to procure arms due to Western restrictions, Tehran stepped in as a middleman, sourcing weapons from West Germany and delivering them to Pakistan.
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The same pattern was repeated in 1971. Iran supplied Pakistan with helicopters, artillery, ammunition, spare parts and, more importantly, oil at concessional rates during wartime. Once again, Tehran acted as Pakistan’s arms purchasing agent when Islamabad was shut out of Western military markets. The Shah again accused Bharat of “blatant aggression”.
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Only towards the twilight of his reign did cracks appear in this alliance, and this occurred because of Pakistan’s growing closeness to the Shah’s regional rival, Muammar Gaddafi.
To romanticise the Shah as a lost liberal saviour, especially from Bharat’s perspective, is not merely historically inaccurate but geostrategically imprudent.
Equally fanciful is the belief that a post-Islamic Iran would naturally revert to Zoroastrianism or some revived pre-Islamic civilisational identity. Yes, Iranians retain pride in their ancient past in ways Pakistanis do not. But pride in pre-Islamic history does not translate into rejection of Islam.
This distinction is critical and often misunderstood.
Iran’s engagement with its pre-Islamic past has always been selective and symbolic, not restorative. Ancient Persia is celebrated as heritage, not as an alternative civilisational anchor. The past is admired precisely because it is mummified — culturally contained and politically non-threatening.
Author Aatish Taseer analyses this aspect in his book Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands. He records a Pakistani response to why, unlike in Iran, Pakistan’s “pre-Islamic history” is not living. The reply was revealing: “If all India became Muslim, we might have been able to identify with the Hindu past. We would have modified something. But since it didn’t happen that way, we can’t choose something that goes against our taste. You won’t wear a T-shirt you don’t like.”
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Iran’s openness to its pre-Islamic past exists precisely because it has been mummified and rendered “irrecoverable”, unlike in Pakistan, where, as VS Naipaul writes in Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, “vital fragments of the past lived on in dress, customs, ceremonies, festivals and, importantly, ideas of caste”.
Novelist Salman Rushdie puts this more bluntly in his book Shame: “To build Pakistan, it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time.”
For Pakistan, acknowledging the pre-Islamic past would mean acknowledging Bharat — an existential impossibility for a state founded on rejecting the very idea of Bharat. Any legitimisation of that past would unravel the ideological basis of Pakistan itself. Iran faces no such dilemma. Its pre-Islamic history does not challenge its territorial or civilisational legitimacy. This explains why Iranians can display pride in Persepolis while remaining deeply Islamic in identity.
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The greatest self-deception in liberal thinking across the world is the belief that a “Muslim liberal” is simply a liberal who happens to be Muslim. This is a well-curated myth. Islam is not merely a belief system; it is a totalising historical and political identity. Call this phenomenon ‘Islamic exceptionalism’, but when faith weakens here, identity does not disappear — it hardens.
This is why one repeatedly finds individuals who drink, disbelieve and flout religious rules yet instinctively rally to Islam when ‘threatened’. A Muslim liberal may defend free speech until it offends Islam. He may support gender equality until it contradicts religious fundamentals. He may oppose violence until it is sanctified by religious grievance.
Aatish Taseer captures this dichotomy in Stranger to History. Writing about his father, Salman Taseer — the liberal Pakistani politician shot dead by his own bodyguard in 2011 for opposing the blasphemy law — he notes that his father was not a practising Muslim, yet this never conflicted with his self-image as a defender of the faith.
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“I felt sure that none of Islam’s once powerful moral imperatives existed within him, but he was a Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America and Israel, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him. The faith decayed within him, ceased to be dynamic, ceased to provide moral guidance, and became nothing but a deep, unreachable historical and political identity,” writes Taseer.
This phenomenon is not unique to Iran or Pakistan. It has also played out in secular Bharat’s Kashmir, where Hindu minorities were ethnically cleansed in the 1990s, yet liberal outrage remained conspicuously absent. “The sense of being a Muslim,” writes Hasan Suroor in Who Killed Liberal Islam, “is simply too overwhelming to resist, even for non-practising or liberal Muslims.”
This is why the idea that Iranians will swap Islam for Zoroastrianism is ludicrous.
Yes, apostasy is rising in Iran. Yes, many Iranians privately reject Islam. But this trend, while significant, is nowhere near a civilisational tipping point. These individuals do not form a coherent alternative civilisation. They are fragmented, cautious and numerically insufficient to redefine Iran. To conflate these silent dissenters with cultural liberals — or worse, to assume they represent the Iranian mainstream — is analytical laziness, if not dishonesty.
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There is no denying that the Khamenei regime faces an existential crisis. There is widespread anger among the people. But to fantasise about a revival of Zoroastrianism or imagine the return of a Western-style democracy is liberal imagination gone wild.
Myths, however comforting they may be, are hardly a substitute for historical truths and geopolitical realities.
(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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