What You Don’t Know About Iran’s Theocracy

Mehran Kamrava’s work empowers us to analyze the Islamic Republic not as just a crude dictatorship, but as a doctrinal system that turned political theology into durable institutions of rule.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is often described as a repressive regime cloaked in religion. That is accurate, but it misses the main point. The regime’s durability is not explained by violence alone, but by theology molded into governing doctrine and successfully embedded into institutions. The regime strategically wields religion as a machinery of rule.

Mehran Kamrava’s How Islam Rules in Iran is valuable precisely because it treats the system as it is, not as its critics wish it to be. The book’s argument is unsettling and straightforward: Iran is not a standard authoritarian state with Islamic aesthetics. It is an ideologically engineered order with a serious internal logic. There is more theoretical substance beneath the Islamic Republic’s institutions than is generally assumed. It is not a run-of-the-mill authoritarian system built on crude force alone.

At the center of this order is velayat-e faqih, or the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. The concept existed in Shi'a thought prior to the revolution, but in a more limited form. Jurists were guardians over specific religious and legal domains, not sovereign rulers. Ayatollah Khomeini’s decisive move was to expand the doctrine into a claim of comprehensive political authority. He recast the jurist not as a religious supervisor but as the supreme leader responsible for the whole community, political and profane as well as religious.

That shift did not merely justify seizing power after the fact. It created structure and provided a doctrinal basis for clerical supremacy that could be translated into an elaborate constitutional and institutional architecture. The Islamic Republic could now present coercion as duty and dissent as deviation.

This is where many outside observers still misunderstand Iran. They assume the regime survives by opportunism and intimidation. It survives, in large part, by managing legitimacy as an argument rather than a verdict. The Islamic Republic never definitively resolves whether legitimacy comes from God or from the people. Instead, it advances an awkward compromise: legitimacy is divine, acceptance is popular, and the regime claims it needs both.

This ambiguity is not an accident. It allows the regime to invoke elections when elections help, and to invoke divine authority when elections threaten. In practice, popular participation becomes conditional. The ballot is permitted to the extent that it does not challenge the clerical veto.

This is why arguments about “stolen elections” often miss the deeper reality. The regime is not designed to be accountable in the modern sense, but to remain legitimate on its own terms even when it becomes unpopular. When legitimacy is anchored in divine sanction, the people can be recast from citizens into subjects who have merely fallen into error.

Another widespread misconception is that the clerical establishment is an independent religious force that captured the state. The reality is more damning. Over time, the state came to control the clerical establishment. It did so by bureaucratizing it, financing it, and steadily monopolizing the institutions that produce religious authority and knowledge. Mosques, seminaries, research centers, publishing houses, and other platforms for religious articulation became increasingly controlled by the state, which permits only narrow interpretations aligned with its priorities.

The consequences are as political as they are religious. When a state monopolizes interpretation, faith is no longer primarily a moral or spiritual domain. It becomes administrative. Jurisprudence becomes regulatory, and theology becomes a justification for totalizing command.

The regime embedded this clericalized authority into everyday state functions. Clerics became fixtures in the armed forces, universities, and ideological education, often serving as representatives of the supreme leader. These interactions occur under state auspices, with clerics functioning less as spiritual guides and more as state functionaries. They spread the regime’s conception of Islam through bureaucratic routines and institutional gatekeeping rather than persuasion.

None of this means the regime has enjoyed theological peace. The Islamic Republic faced sustained internal dissent from within Iran’s own religious milieu, particularly during the 1990s and early 2000s. Reformist clerics and religious intellectuals challenged the absolutist reading of velayat-e faqih and sought an Islamic framework compatible with democracy, rights, and pluralism.

Some of the most serious critiques came from figures deeply rooted in Shi‘i scholarship. They argued that political legitimacy could not endure without rational consent and popular will. They warned that instrumentalizing religion for political rule would ultimately corrode religion itself. When jurisprudence is used to justify coercion, faith loses moral credibility, and religion rots from within.

Rather than a liberal polemic imported from abroad, critics offered an internal religious critique grounded in Iran’s own intellectual tradition. And it revealed something essential: the regime’s most dangerous challengers were often those who contested its theology rather than its practices.

The regime’s response was not intellectual engagement, but swift institutional suppression. Reformist clerics were marginalized, prosecuted, defrocked, or silenced through mechanisms designed to police interpretation. The aim was not simply to punish dissent, but to eliminate theological alternatives.

When a theocracy criminalizes alternative readings of its own spiritual texts, it stops behaving like a religious order and begins acting like a security state with scripture as its administrative code.

Over time, the system hardened into what can best be described as an official orthodoxy centered on the authority of the supreme leader. Jurisprudential flexibility narrowed, and dissent was increasingly treated as both political and religious transgression.

This is significant because it explains why the Islamic Republic does not yield easily. The regime lacks charisma and relies on procedural effectiveness—and does not care if the people concur with its stated beliefs. It simply depends on institutionalized compliance and can absorb moral rejection without surrendering authority.

This reality complicates how protest movements are understood. Protest expresses social rejection, but rejection alone does not dismantle a doctrinal state. The Islamic Republic is built to survive legitimacy crises by retreating into theology and coercive maneuvers. It can reinterpret dissent as deviation, resistance as sedition, and failure as foreign conspiracy.

But there is a cost to this approach that the regime cannot avoid. By conflating religion with governance, it has bound the credibility of faith to the state’s performance. The effort to monopolize interpretation may preserve power in the short term, but it accelerates public disillusionment with religion itself.

That is the paradox of Iran’s theocracy. It seeks sanctity as a shield, and in doing so, it exposes said sanctity to contamination.

What you don’t know about Iran’s theocracy is not that it represses. That is obvious.

What is less understood is how it rules and why it endures. It endures because it transformed political theology into governing architecture and captured the institutions that reproduce that theology. Because it can invoke the people when useful and God when necessary.

Understanding this does not soften the indictment. A regime that must enforce its theology through coercion has already confessed its spiritual failure.

A state that prosecutes alternative readings of religion has turned faith into a security matter and rendered it spiritually bankrupt.

A system that merges divine legitimacy with political control will always treat dissent not as disagreement, but as sin.

If Iran is to change, opposing repression will not be enough. Repression is an output. The engine lies deeper, in the theological and institutional architecture that authorizes it. Until that architecture is confronted, delegitimized, and replaced with durable alternatives, the Islamic Republic will continue to outlast moments of revolt.

Protest and international condemnation cannot defeat systems like this. They are defeated when their claims to legitimacy collapse and the institutions that enforce them can no longer hold the line.

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