“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.” — Rumi
The only way I can contact any family in Tehran right now amid shuttered internet connectivity and servers under cyberattack is through Instagram voice notes exchanged with my cousin, my childhood best friend. I haven’t seen him in over 27 years. The story of our separation contains the marks that aren’t unique to me but are commonplace among Iranians spread all over the world. Revolution, war, repression, uprising, migration, separation, hyphenated identities: longing.
For Iranians, the anticipatory dread of a long and deadly war has been a constant drone since Israel’s June 2025 attacks that launched a 12-day war. Even before then, it has felt like a distant but looming possibility for decades. Now that it’s here, the space between those of us in the diaspora and those inside Iran has never felt smaller yet so far out of reach. Connected by our deep capacity for empathy and compassion. Disconnected by communication and financial restrictions. Those of us outside are inspired by the ordinary courage and bravery of those inside, who in turn look to us in the diaspora for solidarity and recognition.
My story of immigration to the United States is like that of many others whose lives have been shaped by the turmoil of political upheaval. Forced to leave Tehran when I was six years old along with my sister and parents and eventually winding up in California by chance, I still struggle with the idea of home and what it means to be from a place that bears so much on who I am–yet remains so far from where I live. The Persian word “ghorbat” roughly translates to a feeling of exile, or a state of non-belonging in an open-ended strangeness dislodged from home. We float in-between the nostalgia of “ghorbat” and the multiplicity of diaspora in this interstitial midway of migration.
Longing for home is not just an abstract performance of identity. It’s the streets, parks, ice cream, smells, plastic red soccer balls, and cartoons of my childhood. It’s my dad’s yellow and maroon Volkswagen Beetle that we once took on a long road trip to Mashhad to visit the shrine of Imam Reza. It’s the inheritance of a long history.
The stress and tragedy of watching the destruction of your home and its people from a distance is a cruel proposition. Many Iranians today know someone whose life has been cut short: from poverty, from government brutality, or from Israeli and American munitions. Iranians barely had time to grieve their dead from the latest uprisings that started over inflation when the Americans and Israelis chose to attack again. The apocalyptic images of death and damage in Tehran and across the country that continue to trickle out fill us with horror.
Somewhere between the decades-long history of foreign interference and domestic Iranian state repression lies the double-edged bind facing Iranians. An unyielding demand for self-determination inside Iran is often weaponized to serve as justification for foreign war. The binary drawn by U.S. media, and increasingly by supporters of the exiled Reza Pahlavi, suggests that we must either participate in the narrative justifying foreign invasion or be complicit in the oppression of the Iranian people. The flawed premise of the question suggests that this is the sole choice available to us in the limited imaginary of the political analyses at hand.
To be clear, while the list of grievances against Iran’s current rulers runs long among Iranians, the destruction of neighboring countries in the region by American and Israeli military escapades terrifies us. American interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have left a trail of theft, state collapse, and misery, while the ongoing genocide in Palestine and wanton bombings in Lebanon executed by Israel and armed and funded by subsequent American administrations continues with inert European complicity.
How can democracy rise from the ashes of dead bodies, traumatized children, and obliterated infrastructure? Young people whose ambitions for liberation represent the clearest challenge to the repressive rule of the Islamic Republic now find themselves imperiled by an act of aggression from two nuclear-armed foreign states whose leaders readily admit their disdain for Iranian wellbeing. Every air strike, car bomb, and threat of annihilation destroys the potential for a democratic movement inside Iran. How can democracy emerge from a foreign-backed regime change engineered by countries that have spent over four decades punishing the Iranian people?
This wouldn’t be the first time the United States has attempted to dictate Iran’s political future. In 1953, President Eisenhower and the CIA orchestrated a coup against Iran’s democratic prime minister to reinstall an authoritarian monarch–Reza Pahlavi’s father–friendly to Western political and economic interests. In the 1980s, the U.S., Europe, and much of the world armed and supported Saddam Hussein as he deployed chemical weapons against Iranians. Under the Islamic Republic, it has been Russia and China that have found themselves the beneficiaries of Iran’s isolation. Yet these constant attempts at external exploitation and domestic repression haven’t prevented Iranians from fighting for their own right to agency.
Resistance doesn’t always look like rebellion either, but manifests in the everyday acts of defiance against imposed censorship and restrictions. Take, for example, Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency (Negaran Nabash). The protagonist in the novel slogs through Tehran breaking social taboos in search of her next opium score, the city physically cracking and socially crumbling around her. The book’s undertones of counterculture and imminent social unrest led to its banning in Iran after the Green Movement of 2009.
Defiance manifests in women refusing to wear their mandatory hijab, in the underground music and social media videos of Iran’s Gen Z, and in soccer players who refuse to celebrate goals in protest. As socioeconomic pressure increases, rather than succeeding in breaking the will of the people, Iranian society has become more brazen and angrier against restrictions, teetering, like in Mohabali’s conjured world, on the verge of transformation.
Amid this transformation, the Iranian architectural historian Shima Mohajeri makes the case for an Iranian version of modernity that is not an orientalist fetish of the nation, nor is it a project longing after some lost “original” Aryan identity, nor is it an imposed capitalist hybrid that hollows out all signs of life for the sake of development. Rather, she claims, it is a response to present conditions and a transversal connection between the local and the global that imagines new, vibrant spaces of being responsive to the demands of ordinary Iranian life.[1] You can already see this innovation in some of the contemporary brickwork and modular designs of residential buildings in Tehran by Alireza Taghaboni. You can also find it in Iranian cinema, in the time-defying and self-reflexive works of Shahram Mokri and Jafar Panahi. Similarly, it exists in the hybrid, multi-media and three-dimensional paintings of Arghavon Khosravi.
Indeed, a brighter and freer future for the people of Iran, whose fate is also tied to a larger regional peace that has eluded the region for what seems like a century of colonial ruin, requires a deeper accounting of our history. Despite reeling from heavy sanctions and government crackdowns, Iranian civil society continues to grow and push for change from within. War is a sure death knell for the prospect of domestic change for the better. Civil society groups will be shunted, dissent will be framed as treason by an ever more paranoid government, and discontent will simmer as tension rises between Iranians all over the world who find themselves bitterly divided by diverging political lines.
As Iranians and Americans, we have an obligation to say no to militarism against Iran and the Iranian people, lest it comes at the price of an organic movement for democracy, another discarded casualty of an unjust war in the Middle East. What will come next feels more uncertain than ever. The only certainty seems to be that those in power demand a stake in determining Iran’s borders, resources, and future.
But whatever the outcome, Iranians will remain a proud people defiant of foreign attempts to dictate our future–Persian, Afghan, Baluch, Kurd, Turk, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Baha’i, Jewish, Christian, and secular–together not in search of empire but the solidarity that the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi described almost 800 years ago with the wisdom that all “Sons of Adam are parts of one body.” With the hospitality to welcome the world into that place Anthony Bourdain fell in love with as “Neither East nor West, but always somewhere in the middle.”
In the fragility of the moment, in the wake of terrifying images broadcast from Tehran, Iranians remain inspiringly resilient. We will remember how a farmer loaded his truck with potatoes to hand out to the hungry; how a street musician played the violin as bombs rained in the background; and how a community showed up en masse to mourn its young girls killed in a missile strike. In one of the many voice-notes we’ve been exchanging, my cousin consoled me not to worry, that they’ll be fine, that this will all end, and we will be reunited once again like we were as kids. I will continue to believe him even in the face of a bleak war that threatens to rupture the beauty of our culture.
Samine Joudat, PhD, is an Iranian American writer, editor, and creative director.
[1] Mohajeri, Shima. Architectures of Transversality: Paul Klee, Louis Kahn and the Persian Imagination. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2018.