For years I have noticed the same thing when listening to Iranians or reading their words - and the particular weight that lies beneath their voice when they speak of their country. From my local kiosk owner to international podcasts - very often the same thing in their voice.
It is not only anger at a regime, and it is not simply political dissatisfaction. It is something older and more silent than that. As if they carry the memory of a house they still inhabit, but which someone has rebuilt from within, while they slept.
A sorrow that is not primarily about the loss of prosperity or political influence, but about the loss of an inner continuity, about the break in the narrative a people has told itself through millennia.
Some of you who are separated from a former partner, especially with children between you, know the edge of this sorrow. The narrative that ceases. The loss of meaning. The dream and hope that never resolves.
Such a sorrow many Persians carry in their hearts, and it cannot be grasped if one reduces it to disagreement about forms of government or to ordinary dissatisfaction with rulers, for what happened in 1979 in Iran is experienced by many not merely as a revolution, but as a recoding of the nation's very soul.
For Iran was not a state that arose in the twentieth century.
Iran was the heir to one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations, whose roots stretch back to the empire we today call the Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great, whose name still whispers through the ruins at Pasargadae and Persepolis like an echo from a time when power did not necessarily mean uniformity, and where an empire could contain many peoples without demanding their soul as payment.
In that world a religious and philosophical conception emerged, which we today call Zoroastrianism, and which shaped a cosmology where man stood in a dramatic field of tension between truth and lie, light and darkness, and where the individual human being's moral choices had cosmic significance.
It was not merely a faith, but a way of understanding existence's structure, a narrative about responsibility and dignity, which laid itself as an undercurrent through Persian poetry, art and understanding of state long after other conquerors had come and gone.
When one hears many Iranians today, especially those who remember the time before the Islamic revolution, one senses not merely criticism of a regime, but a deeper feeling that something older and more fragile was pushed aside when Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and the new state was founded as an Islamic republic.
The new order was not merely political. It was theological, and it made claim to define law, morality and public order from a religious authority that stood above the historical nation. Thereby arose a strange double state, where Iran remained Persia in its language, in its poetry and in its family traditions, but where the state spoke another language about legitimacy and identity, a language that for many felt like a layer laid on top of the older narrative - and not like its natural continuation. At all.
It is in this tension that the experience of occupation arises, as an inner structure that permeates legislation, education and public morality and which ultimately claims to have precedence over the nation's pre-Islamic heritage.
When a civilization that once defined itself through kings, poets and cosmic narratives about truth's struggle against the lie must suddenly understand itself primarily through a totalitarian religious state's doctrine and law, many experience it as if their historical face has been covered by a mask that does not quite fit the features they recognize in the mirror.
If they can see themselves in the mirror at all, after the new imposed clothing for women is forced down over their heads.
To grasp this sorrow one must imagine that something similar happened here.
Imagine that Denmark one morning awoke to the announcement that the Constitution was revoked, that Parliament was dissolved, and that the country had now become "The Socialist People's Republic of Denmark", where all legislation and all education were to be subordinated to one all-encompassing ideology that explained the past as a long mistake and the future as necessity's march toward the classless society.
Imagine that the churches were not burned, but transformed into party houses, that their symbols remained standing but interpreted anew as steps on the path toward revolution, and that your children in school learned that their ancestors' conceptions of freedom and responsibility were expressions of false consciousness, which now fortunately had been overcome.
You would still speak Danish, you would still recognize the landscape, and yet something decisive would be changed, for the state would no longer rest on the historical continuity between people, law and tradition, but on an ideology that made claim to rewrite the very narrative about who you are - and therefore the entire people's heart.
It is this type of inner displacement many Persians experience when they see their country defined first and foremost as an Islamic republic and only secondarily as heir to an ancient Persian civilization.
The sorrow is therefore not so much political, but existential, because it concerns the right to recognize one's own reflection in the nation's face.
When a people feels that its oldest roots have been made secondary in its own home, a quiet longing arises to be allowed to tell its story without superstructure, without ideological filter, and this longing cannot be dismissed as nostalgia, but must be understood as an expression of the deep human need for coherence between past, present and future.
To speak of Iran today without understanding this inner tension is like observing a tree and seeing only its outermost branches, without sensing the root system that once bore it. And when many Iranians grieve, it is not merely over what they lack, but over what they remember, for they know that their civilization was older than the regime, broader and far more beautiful than its doctrines and richer than the image the world often reduces them to.
Their sorrow is therefore not merely a cry for political change, but a quiet hope to again be able to live in an order where the nation's oldest light does not stand in the shadow of an ideological superstructure - but is allowed to shine with its own name.
Let us hope they find a path to that now, when the head has been severed from the serpent.
Meanwhile the rest of us ought to watch - and learn from - what happens when one attempts to take a people's national identity, self-understanding and heritage from them.
For that question is entirely real here.
❤️🔥🪽
