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The protest movement in Iran is no longer selectively targeting certain symbols of the Islamic Republic, as it did a decade ago. It is now challenging everything the Islamic Republic represents, including the national flag itself.
One of the earliest visible signs of this state–society rupture emerged in 2009, when students set fire to a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the 1979 revolution. At the time, the act carried such a strong taboo that opposition leaders suggested it may have been carried out by elements linked to the security apparatus, to justify a harsher crackdown.
Around the same period, protesters began chanting, “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon — my life for Iran,” signaling a shift from the Islamic Republic’s transnational ideology to a national identity.
The Islamic Republic used such displays of anger in state television propaganda to discredit protesters. Yet each time, segments of the public repeated those same acts, turning them into a new front of defiance against the state.
The display of anger soon expanded to other figures — including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior military figures such as Qassem Soleimani, who had embodied Iran’s extraterritorial revolutionary doctrine. Their posters were torn down and burned.
Public anger even targeted the Iranian national football team during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which many Iranians viewed not as a sporting body but as a representative of the Islamic Republic.
For many Iranians, the team’s international presence risked strengthening the state’s domestic legitimacy and global image at a time when large segments of society felt alienated from it.
The depth of the rupture became particularly visible in June 2025, when many Iranians celebrated the killing of senior Iranian military commanders by Israel. Military figures who had been presented as national heroes four decades earlier during the war with Iraq were no longer seen as representing the nation.
Burning the flag
Students at several universities across Iran held protest gatherings for the third consecutive day on Monday, chanting slogans against Khamenei and in support of opposition figure exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi.
During their gatherings, they trampled on the flag of the Islamic Republic and threw it toward members of the security forces. At Amir Kabir University, the University of Tehran, and Alzahra University, students set fire to the flag of the Islamic Republic.
The Islamic Republic tried in 1979 to combine national and Islamic elements in the national flag. It took the colors from the pre-revolutionary flag and added the phrase “Allahu Akbar” in the middle. This is the part that many Iranians no longer sympathize with.
Iranian law does not explicitly criminalize insulting the national flag, but it can be prosecuted since the flag bears the word “Allah,” and insulting Islamic sanctities can carry severe penalties.
Islamic Republic vs. Iran
The Islamic Republic, from the very beginning, showed little regard for many Iranian traditions and symbols. Khomeini and his allies attempted to replace Nowruz new year celebration with Islamic religious holidays, although they failed.
While the White House displays a Nowruz table with traditional symbols, Khamenei delivers his New Year speeches without a Nowruz table, with only a photo of Khomeini in the background.
For many years after the revolution, the national flag did not occupy a central place in the Islamic Republic’s public symbolism.
That changed during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when the display of flags expanded dramatically. Streets were lined with newly produced, brightly colored flags, and government buildings were draped in national symbols.
This was not merely aesthetic. It coincided with the intensification of the nuclear dispute and a deliberate effort to frame Iran’s nuclear program as a matter of national sovereignty rather than regime ideology.
After the 12-day war with Israel in June, the Islamic Republic made an attempt to revive some of the national symbols and motifs. At one point, after emerging from his war bunker, Khamenei asked a religious singer to perform a song about Iran. But many Iranians saw that as too little, too late.
The resentment between segments of society and the state — and anything associated with it — has intensified to such a degree that long-standing religious funeral traditions have begun to fade. The customary recitation of the Quran at funeral ceremonies has been largely replaced by music, and mourners have even danced at the funerals of victims killed during the January protests.
In certain instances, people have worn white instead of black, returning not to pre-revolutionary but pre-Islamic traditions.
