An Elegy for the Iran I Knew
Iran’s metamorphosis is that of a country estranged from its identity, deluded about its present, confused about its future, and detached from its past.
By Kourosh Ziabari
Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist based in the United States. He is a contributor to Foreign Policy and New Lines Magazine and has reported widely on Iran and the Middle East.
Long before moving to the United States, I believed I had a moral duty to share with the world the stories of Iran that I thought were being deliberately stifled or otherwise hidden from view. Growing up in Iran in a household of journalists, the news dominated most family conversations. Even when my parents and I discussed mundane chores or family trivia, we would soon drift into politics or the world beyond Iran.
My late father and I would often chat about how local journalism in Guilan, the northern province where I was born and raised, was corrupted by the outsized influence of local officials who would co-opt reporters into essentially serving as their personal PR representatives. And I was outspoken in my criticism of how the weekly magazine my father edited, which was the first home for my writing as a precocious child, was not maintaining enough editorial independence and improving its print quality.
Conversations with my mother tended to be more international in scope, given her interest in Western philosophy and literature. A section in the magazine that she ran for nearly 15 years, titled “The Newest of Books,” was a familiar fixture in the weekly digest for readers who appreciated culture beyond the borders of Guilan, a small province on the Caspian Sea.
The three of us would often reflect on why the Iran that was depicted in most popular international media was such a distorted visualization of the country. The Iran we knew couldn’t be conveniently minimized to caricatures and platitudes about its present and past.
I came of age in the strangling years of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when the aspirations of a generation of Iranians were crushed to serve the isolationist brand of his hard-line, revolutionary politics. Ahmadinejad was 49 when he was elected president in 2005, and as a relatively young politician in Iran’s system of aged clerics, he was also ambitious.
The firebrand former mayor of Tehran had comfortably won the presidency over Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the veteran pragmatist figure, former president, and a founding figure of the Islamic Republic. What made Ahmadinejad’s recklessness and inexperience matter was that an entire nation had to pay the price for them.
When Ahmadinejad was elected, Iran was just emerging from a relatively successful period of reintegration with the world following the eight years of brutal war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s. Saddam’s regime was gone, toppled by the United States, which had invaded and occupied Iraq—and now threatened Iran. With Ahmadinejad as president, Iran was plunged into the abyss of isolation anew. Every statement he made, including his repeated Holocaust denial and incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric, sent political shock waves and led to seemingly endless diplomatic disputes.
In those years, I felt what it meant to live on an island that had just been deserted. For all of Iran’s richness and life, its new face in the world was a man harboring extreme ideas. International news coverage, mesmerized by the magnitude of the moral decay he represented, was solely moved by the “Iranian threat,” and nothing else.
To see such an unrecognizable Iran today—in abject poverty, constantly threatening or being threatened with war, consumed by tensions while its incompetent rulers kill its own people for daring to protest—is not just disheartening, but stifling.
As a journalist, I sought to depict the more humane face of a country and its people I am still convinced are misunderstood. Nearly every journalist, academic, travel writer, or politician visiting Iran for the first time whom I’ve interviewed has told me some version of, “It was different from what I had thought.”
In so much international media, an apparently unwritten consensus rules that every story with an Iran angle needs be alarmist and tinged with some orientalist tropes. To some, an article on Iran may come across as inadequate without a reference to the “mullah’s regime.”
Which is why people express surprise when there are stories grounded in Iranian society and culture that offer a new perspective, such as the defiant views of a human rights defender inside Iran, or the rich history of an iconic railway cutting through the country. Even the late Anthony Bourdain utilized the power of food to shed light on the unseen aspects of culture and society in a country where people are fighting to live better lives.
That the reporting is skewed in favor of an unreformable narrative that is also hardening political attitudes is not everyone else’s fault. For years, Iran’s contentious nuclear program has been one of the biggest fault lines in global affairs and a major source of tension both in the Middle East and in Iran’s ties with Western powers, especially the United States. Iran’s sponsorship of militant proxies in the Middle East has not just rattled those same countries; its neighbors in the region are also unwilling to countenance this adventurism and intervention anymore.
The Iranian government has also had a troubling pattern of detaining dual citizens as diplomatic pawns, in what has come to be known as Tehran’s hostage diplomacy, and it doesn’t appear to be abating. Iran’s abysmal track record of human rights abuses and its state-sanctioned misogyny, from the compulsory hijab law to the draconian “morality police,” are not tantrums made up by foreign adversaries—the Iranian people have been resisting these measures on their own for years at great risk to their lives and livelihoods, and virtually without the world’s support.
I decided to write about Iran, as a journalist hailing from Iran, based on my conviction that I could highlight the untold stories of the country that other journalists weren’t covering. I believed I understood Iran’s culture and heritage—from its cinema to literature to musical traditions to the lives of its ordinary citizens—and assumed I could drive home the message that Iran is not merely a country with a nuclear fixation, or a “nation of terror,” as Donald Trump once put it, with a menacing military network. It is a rich, diverse, and proud nation anchored in history—not one with artificial borders that should be fractured and broken up into smaller pieces, as a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed casually suggested.
But now, on the heels of a horrific state crackdown on protesters, resulting in so many civilian casualties, I wonder if there is any space left to write about this other Iran. It seems impossible to cover Iran, at least for now, outside of the frame of repression and regime brutality. Am I bound to recreate the same stereotypes that I’ve always been critical of?
With thousands of Iranian protesters killed and the country effectively shut off from the world under a sweeping internet blackout, I mourn the Iran I know. Just months ago, a 12-day war with Israel left scores of Iranians dead and further weakened the country’s ailing economy. Where is the treasured past—and the vibrant present, shaped by writers, artists, musicians, comedians—that Iran once celebrated?
It is not just social cohesion, civil dialogue, and collective identity that have cratered in Iranian society, leading to the agonizing scenes of the past few weeks: security forces firing on their fellow citizens, and unknown armed operatives firebombing businesses, health clinics, grocery stores, and buses. And it is not just the physical wreckage of these days of chaos, after the destruction wrought by the war with Israel last June, that denote a country in the throes of disaster.
Iran’s metamorphosis is that of a country estranged from its identity, deluded about its present, confused about its future, and detached from its past. The hostile messaging on state television scoffing at the elements of Iranian culture that Iranians actually value—such as the traditions of the Persian New Year, Nowruz—and belittling its secularized youths, alongside sermons delivered by firebrand clerics every Friday brandishing divine revenge on “the enemy,” do not point to a healthy status quo.
Iran remains one of the world’s oldest, continuously sovereign states. It has pioneered artifacts of knowledge that human civilization remains indebted to—from the world’s first monotheistic religion and the first charter of human rights, to algebra and ancient wind catchers that provided passive cooling in the desert heat. By some accounts, alcohol was also first distilled in Persia, by the medieval polymath Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, born near present-day Tehran.
To see such an unrecognizable Iran today—in abject poverty, constantly threatening or being threatened with war, consumed by tensions while its incompetent rulers kill its own people for daring to protest—is not just disheartening, but stifling.
Do I get to write about those brilliant musicians, painters, mural artists, standup comedians, and child prodigies, or do those accounts need to be put on the back burner before a new flare-up happens, so that I can pitch stories that the market is looking for? Where is the Iran I know?