In febrile Tehran atmosphere, all public life is a combat sport

To many viewers it looks like a cultural opening: a genre long associated with underground resistance now visible on mainstream screens.

But researcher and artist Siavash Rokni, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal who studies Iranian youth culture, pop music and the communication dynamics of social movements, argues that that the reality is more complicated.

“It is a public relations performance,” he said. “It is fooling a lot of people, and we need to stop being fooled by it.”

Rokni has followed the evolution of Iran’s rap scene across five generations. He sees the new appetite for rap not as legalization but domestication, turning underground culture into something profitable and controllable.

Entertainment shows and “normal” rappers

One of the most watched programs in this space is BaZia, hosted by a former Iranian state television personality now living in Turkey. According to Rokni, the show’s guest selection and narratives suggest an ongoing connection with Iran.

“Technically speaking, he is no longer connected to the system,” Rokni said. “But the way he chooses his guests shows there is a connection.”

The rappers appearing on BaZia help normalize a particular type of rap that is not inclusive of all aspects of this cultural practice. Many of the same rappers featured on BaZia are now set to appear in a new rap-themed program hosted by him called GANG. Rokni says it shows how this was part of a larger plan to create momentum for the new show while normalizing a particular narrative of regime approved rap.

The narrative, Rokni said, “comes very slowly” through a sequence of interviews. Artists describe performing abroad but wanting to return. Producers talk about the economic advantage of bringing rap back while being able to control the content.

Money, control and aesthetics

Much of Iran’s music economy is in the hands of a profit-minded clique, Rokni said.

“The people who are running this oligarchical capitalism are connected to the Islamic Republic,” he said. “They just want to make cash.”

He stressed that the motivation is not necessarily ideological. Many simply benefit from the system’s structures.

The appearance of rap on screens has been accompanied by pressure and arrests behind the scenes. In early October at least five rappers and a composer were detained in Tehran and Shiraz, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran.

Security forces raided homes, seized phones and recording equipment and transferred the men to detention.

Within days videos appeared on their Instagram accounts with shaved heads and visible tattoos, apologizing on camera. Lawyers told CHRI the accounts had been taken over by cyber police.

One of the most high profile cases remains Toomaj Salehi, whose lyrics became an anthem of the Women Life Freedom movement.

He was arrested, abused in detention, sentenced to death, released on bail and then rearrested after publicly describing his treatment. Supporters say he is targeted because he refuses to leave Iran or be silent.

Female rappers face even greater constraints. Iran bans solo female singers from performing publicly or releasing their own vocals, forcing artists into exile or underground spaces. Studios refused to record them and venues were raided for illegal performances.

Why normalize rap at all?

Rokni traces the logic back to then Iranian president Mohammad Khatami era when the government offered small cultural openings to create a sense of possibility.

“You free some cultural restrictions and reconcile with the people,” he said. “You give hope. And that can be taken away very easily.”

He called this strategy dishonest. Licensing and televised satire, he said, do not signal reform. They are tools for narrative management.

Oppression, he argued, is often brief.

“They put a lid on it,” he said. “But the program starts after that.”

The backlash against licensed rappers, especially those connected to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, has been emotional. Some consider state approved albums a betrayal. Others see economic survival.

Rokni believes the solution is parallel economies, enabling musicians to make money without going through state linked producers or licensing offices.

“Do it yourself,” he said. He pointed to artists who built audiences through Instagram and streaming platforms.

In today’s Iran rap carries two meanings. One version is polished, licensed and safe. The other remains underground created by musicians who refuse to compromise.

Both exist at once but only one is protected.

The story is not the “death of religion,” as it may appear from social media snippets depicting once unheard of public concerts and women spurning the mandatory hijab, but a fundamental reordering of how Iranians relate to faith.

Recent surveys by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) found 68% oppose the continuation of the Islamic Republic. Support for its leader and revolutionary principles fell from 18% to 11% between 2022 and 2024.

A leaked culture ministry survey reported that 73% favor separating religion and state. A peer-reviewed article by Ali Sarihan of Maryland's St. Mary's College, published in the journal Religions puts support for a secular system at around 70%.

Yet other indicators show Iran is not secular in the familiar Western sense. The World Values Survey (WVS) still finds 96% identify as Muslim and only 1.3% as atheist.

Faith endures, it seems. It is political Islam that is losing ground.

Hidden secularism

Classic secularization theory imagined that modernization would push religion out of public life. Iran shows something more layered: personal belief can survive even as the political project built around it collapses.

Sociologist Asef Bayat has called this “post-Islamism”—a phase in which political Islam has exhausted its appeal, even as many Iranians retain some form of private faith.

Iran is not “non-religious,” Bayat argues. It is post-theocratic in its political aspirations.

Religious practice has thinned markedly.

Sarihan's study also suggests that the share of Iranians who “always or often” pray fell from 78% in 2015 to 55% in 2023—a steady decline shaped, and likely accelerated in recent years, by repression and economic crisis.

The WVS relies on face-to-face interviews, which in a country like Iran give respondents every incentive to conceal dissent or non-conformity.

Belief recast

Religious rituals remain part of everyday life.

The Shi'ite religious holy days of Muharram and Arbaeen still draw large crowds especially outside major cities, and shrines remain busy.

But for younger Iranians, who express the highest levels of political dissatisfaction, religion no longer aligns with state intrusion into private life.

The compulsory hijab, morality policing and the regulation of personal behavior have turned religion, for many, into a vehicle of control.

The widespread protests of 2022, known by their rallying cry of Woman, Life, Freedom, exposed this rupture. The slogans were never an assault on faith itself but on the state’s claim to define and enforce it.

On social media, hashtags rejecting the Islamic Republic sit comfortably alongside posts defending personal belief. The distinction between faith and religious governance has become unmistakable.

Coercion to choice

Iran’s path to secularization is unusual because it runs in two directions at once: from above and from below.

Heavy-handed enforcement—from hijab rules to cultural censorship—has alienated generations and inadvertently strengthened the case for separating religion and power.

GAMAAN’s highest recorded opposition to the theocratic system came at the height of the 2022 protests, when women’s bodily autonomy became the central battleground: four out of five respondents said they would vote “no” to an Islamic Republic in a hypothetical referendum.

Meanwhile, everyday acts of defiance are reshaping religious life from the ground up.

Women walk unveiled. Families who still value faith increasingly bypass official religious bodies. Younger Iranians look for ethics and spirituality beyond state-sanctioned channels.

God versus government

Two caricatures usually obscure the real picture. Iran is not a “godless society”: personal belief, ritual and religious meaning remain widespread. But nor is it the devout political community the state insists it governs.

The Islamic Republic’s project of political Islam has lost its authority, and most Iranians now prefer a secular political order.

The theocracy has produced one of the region’s strongest secularizing shifts—not through reform but through coercion. The more it has enforced religious rule, the more clearly Iranians have separated faith from the state.

Iran today stands between private, chosen belief and state-imposed religion.

The secularization of politics is now a structural threat to Islamic rule—one that often goes unnoticed amid a myriad of more immediate, louder crises.

After winning the prestigious Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Panahi’s film has now been nominated for Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Non-English Language Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes 2026.

Panahi’s film will compete in the Best Motion Picture (Drama) category alongside Frankenstein, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, and Sinners.

In the Best Director category, he is nominated alongside Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another, Ryan Coogler for Sinners, Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein, Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value and Chloé Zhao for Hamnet.

Shot secretly in Tehran, the film has already been selected by France as its official submission to the 2026 Oscars and will also represent France at the Golden Globes.

Last week, Iranian lawyer Mostafa Nili announced that Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran sentenced Panahi in absentia to one year in prison.

The verdict cited “propaganda against the state” and imposed a two-year travel ban and a ban on political or social group membership.

Panahi, a long-time critic of the Islamic Republic, said he plans to return to Iran despite the new ruling. The filmmaker has previously been detained and restricted from travel but continued to make movies that later received major awards at Cannes, Berlin and Venice.

The production was carried out under tight constraints inside the capital, continuing Panahi’s long pattern of making films despite restrictions, surveillance and repeated bans on his professional activity.

It Was Just an Accident follows Panahi’s established cinematic approach—minimalist storytelling, non-professional actors and a blend of documentary and fiction.

His earlier works, including Taxi and No Bears, were also created while he was banned from filmmaking and travel, drawing international support for his case.

The sixth Kish Marathon was held on Friday morning with nearly 5,000 runners on the Persian Gulf resort island, including hundreds of unveiled women, despite opposition from Iran’s Athletics Federation which had cited concerns over “legal and religious requirements.”

Hardline factions swiftly framed the event as an assault on Islamic values. Outlets like the Revolutionary Guard-linked Tasnim News Agency accused organizers of deliberately encouraging moral decay, and a local prosecutor confirmed the arrest of a regional official and an organizer.

“This is no longer negligence; the relevant officials must be immediately punished… The Kish Marathon … has turned into a symbol of promoting and advertising licentiousness,” Tasnim wrote.

Ultra-hardliners repeated this framing across social media. Some described the event as “an organized move to promote corruption and widespread uncovering of hair.”

One user, Mehran Karimi, argued in a post on X that “the priority… must be to confront the roots of promoting corruption and prevent the repetition of such a disgrace.”

Ultra-hardliner lawmaker Ali Shirinzad called the marathon a deliberate provocation: “Holding a women's marathon without hijab is a nose-thumbing of the legal and religious principles of the Islamic Republic,” he posted on X.

Much of the criticism has directly targeted President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government, accusing it of enabling hijab violations. One ultra-hardliner wrote on X: “The government has become the main supporter of this organized indecency.”

Double standards exposed

Critics of the crackdown argue that the outrage is selective. Moderate website Rouydad24 highlighted a virtually identical event held at Tehran's Ravagh Mall, where women also participated without full hijab.

“No cries of outrage were raised… Why? Because Ravagh operates under the supervision of a senior state official’s son. Therefore, there is no reprimand whatsoever.”

The report initially identified the senior state official as Ali Asghar Hejazi, the deputy chief of staff to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but later removed his name from the article.

Social media users also shared images of similar marathons held in 2021 and 2023 under former hardline president Ebrahim Raisi—events that violated hijab rules yet went unchallenged.

“The zealots must explain the difference… they remained silent about the first one and declared the second one a crime!” conservative journalist Reza Mansournia remarked on X.

Even the conservative Khorasan newspaper, aligned with Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, warned that the backlash had gone too far, arguing it could harm tourism and the local economy

“Such incidents could not only overshadow a positive event like the Kish Marathon but also cause tensions that are currently not in the interest of national cohesion.”

A crisis the crackdown can't solve

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s recent directive to Pezeshkian’s government, urging tougher enforcement of hijab laws, has fueled fears of a renewed crackdown. Yet even pro-Ghalibaf journalists warn that harsh measures are counterproductive.

Ali Gholhaki wrote that past crackdowns only “amplified the harm several times over,” adding: “Yet now we long for the hijab situation of 10 years ago!”

Former Rouhani-era official Roohallah Jomei contrasted the thousands who joined the Kish marathon with the handful of vigilantes camped outside parliament earlier this year demanding stricter hijab enforcement.

“They couldn't get a hundred people to join them, but more than five thousand went to Kish… Iran will not return to the time before the fall of 2022!” he posted on X.

Moderate politician Sina Kamalkhani added: “The likelihood that the hijab situation will return to what it was before is as much as the likelihood that the dollar (now over 120,000 tomans to the dollar) will return to 3,000 tomans (a few years ago).”

The feminist group Enghelab-e Zanane (Women Revolution), in a statement released on social media, called the arrests evidence of the state’s inability to contain growing public defiance: “The government neither intends to retreat nor is capable of fully enforcing repression; therefore, any free presence of women becomes a security crisis for it.”

Speaking at a ceremony marking Student Day, Pezeshkian addressed the controversy surrounding the preferential access system, which drew widespread criticism after a November update to X revealed that numerous journalists, officials and pro-government figures were using unfiltered connections.

“We have instructed that these white internet lines be turned black as well, to show what will happen to people if this blackness continues,” he said.

Pezeshkian has repeatedly promised to lift filtering, a key pledge of his 2024 presidential campaign. On Sunday, he again suggested that political constraints lie beyond his control. “It is not enough for me to simply order the lifting of filtering. If it could be solved by instruction, we would have done it on the first day,” he said.

The comments came as government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said that the administration seeks “free internet for all,” despite saying last year that no such promise had been made. Instagram, X, Telegram, and some other platforms remain blocked more than a year into Pezeshkian’s term.

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A stalled pledge

Filtering reform was central to Pezeshkian’s campaign, when he said he would “risk his neck” to fix it. Yet in his first meeting of the Supreme Cyberspace Council he emphasized implementing the Supreme Leader’s directives on internet governance rather than easing restrictions and ordered action against the flourishing trade in VPNs.

Since then, senior officials have offered varying timelines. In December, Majid Farahani from the presidential office said filtering would be removed in three phases by the end of the year. The newspaper Farhikhtegan later reported consensus among Iran’s three branches of government to move from blocking toward “smart restrictions,” indicating the system is being recalibrated rather than dismantled.

Public anger intensified after revelations of the white SIM scheme, which critics said exposed a tiered access system contradicting the government’s rhetoric about digital equality.