There is something striking about hearing a fierce critique of political Islam coming not from London, Washington or Canberra, but from an Iranian looking back at more than two millennia of Persian civilisation. Amil Imani, writing in a provocative essay entitled "The Awakening of Persia: Why Iran Stands Alone Against Islam," argues that the Islamic Republic should not be confused with Iran itself. Behind the clerics, compulsory veiling, religious police and revolutionary ideology, he sees another Iran: Persia, the civilisation of Cyrus the Great, Zoroastrianism, Persian poetry and an identity reaching back centuries before the arrival of Islam.
Imani's argument deserves attention precisely because it complicates the way Iran is commonly discussed in the West. Western commentary frequently treats Iran as though its Islamic identity were timeless. Yet the country existed as the centre of sophisticated civilisations long before the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century. The Achaemenid Empire arose in the sixth century BC. Cyrus the Great established an empire encompassing numerous peoples, languages and religions, while Zoroastrianism became deeply embedded in ancient Iranian civilisation. The Sasanian Empire, which fell during the Arab conquests, represented the last great pre-Islamic Persian imperial order.
None of this means that fourteen centuries of Islamic history can simply be peeled away from modern Iranian identity. That is where Imani's rhetoric sometimes outruns the history. Islam was not merely imposed one afternoon at sword-point and grudgingly endured unchanged for the next fourteen centuries. The Arab conquest was military, but Islamisation and the decline of Zoroastrianism were complicated processes occurring over generations. Persia subsequently became one of the great intellectual and cultural centres of the Islamic world. Persian scholars, poets, philosophers and administrators profoundly influenced Islamic civilisation itself.
Indeed, there is an irony here that makes the Iranian story much more interesting than a simple opposition between Persia and Islam. Persia was conquered by Muslim armies, yet Persian civilisation subsequently transformed the civilisation of its conquerors. Persian language survived. Persian literature flourished. Iranian political and administrative traditions persisted. Figures such as Ferdowsi helped preserve memories of Iran's pre-Islamic past. Persia did not simply disappear into an undifferentiated Arab-Islamic civilisation.
Nevertheless, Imani identifies something real when he distinguishes Iran from the Islamic Republic established in 1979. A government is not synonymous with the civilisation it governs. The revolutionary state constructed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deliberately grounded its legitimacy in a particular interpretation of Shi'a Islam and created institutions intended to preserve that ideological order. The resulting political system has imposed religious restrictions that many Iranians clearly reject.
The protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 demonstrated this dramatically. Women publicly removed or burned their headscarves. Demonstrators challenged not merely particular government policies but the authority of the religious establishment itself. The slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" became internationally recognised precisely because the protests concerned something deeper than an argument over dress regulations. They raised the question of whether the state possesses the moral authority to impose religious observance upon individuals who no longer accept its interpretation of religion.
This is where Imani's argument becomes especially uncomfortable for Western observers. In parts of the West, criticism of Islam is sometimes treated primarily through the framework of minority rights, discrimination and social cohesion. Inside Iran, however, criticism of political Islam can mean resistance to the government exercising coercive power over everyday life. The same religion can therefore occupy radically different political positions. A Muslim immigrant in Europe may belong to a minority seeking protection from discrimination, while an Iranian woman resisting compulsory hijab confronts a state claiming religious authority over her body. Confusing those situations produces bad analysis.
It is equally important, however, not to make the opposite mistake by transforming criticism of Islam into hostility towards Muslims or Arabs as peoples. Imani occasionally approaches this boundary when his rhetoric about the Arab conquest becomes sweeping. Ancient military conquest is a legitimate subject of criticism. So are Islamic theology, Islamic law and contemporary Islamist political movements. None of that establishes anything about the inherent character or worth of Arabs or Muslims living today.
The distinction matters intellectually as much as legally. Ideas can be criticised. Religions can be criticised. Governments can be criticised. Historical empires can be criticised. Individuals, however, should not be assigned collective guilt because of their ancestry.
There is also good reason to be cautious about Imani's prediction that Iran is destined to cast Islam aside altogether. Opposition to the Islamic Republic does not necessarily equal opposition to Islam. Iranian society contains secularists, nationalists, monarchists, liberals, Muslims seeking political reform, religious minorities and numerous other currents. No outsider can confidently predict which combination would dominate if the present political order collapsed.
But the rediscovery of pre-Islamic Persian identity is nevertheless politically significant. Symbols matter enormously during periods when governments lose legitimacy. Cyrus the Great, Persepolis, Zoroastrian imagery and the very word "Persia" provide Iranians with an historical vocabulary through which they can imagine Iran without the Islamic Republic. They demonstrate that Iranian identity neither began with the seventh-century conquest nor with Khomeini's revolution in 1979.
That may ultimately be the strongest part of Imani's argument. The Islamic Republic has attempted to present itself as the authentic expression of Iranian civilisation, but Iran's history is vastly larger than the regime presently governing it. Governments come and go. Civilisations have much longer memories.
The West should therefore resist two equally simplistic pictures of Iran. One depicts an inherently Islamic society naturally represented by its clerics. The other imagines tens of millions of secret Western liberals merely waiting for the regime to disappear. Iran is something considerably more complicated: an ancient civilisation negotiating the relationship between Persian nationalism, Islamic history, modernity, religion and political freedom.
If another Iranian revolution eventually comes, its most consequential slogan may therefore concern identity as much as government. The question will not merely be who governs Iran after the Islamic Republic, but what Iran understands itself to be.
Imani already has his answer. Beneath the revolutionary slogans and theological machinery, he believes an older civilisation is waiting. Welcome back to Persia!
https://gellerreport.com/2026/08/while-the-west-surrenders-to-islam-iran-is-fighting-to-break-free-from-it.html/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/07/the-third-wave/
"The moral decline of the West is no longer a matter of speculation but a demographic, cultural, and spiritual fact, visible in collapsing birth rates, the erosion of civilizational confidence, and the supine accommodation of an ideology fundamentally hostile to the Enlightenment inheritance. Where once the West confronted Nazism and Bolshevism—two totalitarian waves that sought to remake humanity through terror and ideology—it now faces a third … advancing not primarily through tanks or gulags, but through demographic momentum, elite cowardice, and the patient erosion of liberal norms.
Time is working against the West. Birth rates do not rebound overnight. Cultural confidence, once lost, is not easily recovered. The third totalitarian wave advances not with blitzkrieg but with patient settlement, higher fertility, and exploitation of liberal guilt. If the West fails to rediscover the will to live—literally, through children, and figuratively, through pride in its achievements—it will submit, piecemeal or catastrophically. Fallaci raged, Steyn calculated, Murray documented. Their shared message is simple and urgent: defend Western liberty, or prepare to lose it forever. History, unforgiving, will judge the generation that chose comfort over survival."