Waging War Against God
Waging War Against God – with a Microphone
I am a political scientist, and the most uncomfortable thing I can tell you about the Islamic Republic is this: it is not paranoid. Its threat assessment is correct, its priorities are rational, and its cruelty is calibrated with precision. That is why this obscene system has stood for 47 years.
Let me put it as crudely as I can. One man against a lion loses. A million men against a million lions win — every time, everywhere in history. Individually, we are mediocre animals. What made us the species that decides everything on this planet is not strength or even raw intelligence; many animals have both, and emotional intelligence besides. It is coordination. The ability of strangers to act as one. The Word.
Every dictatorship senses this. The Islamic Republic understands it scientifically.
The arithmetic of January
Look at what this regime survived six months ago. In January 2026, Iranians rose in the largest uprising since the revolution. On January 8 and 9, the state answered with slaughter — and then cut the entire country off the internet for months, the longest blackout in its history, so that no one could count the bodies.
At least 30,000 people were killed in those two days. Hospital records that reached Time and The Guardian point to that figure as a floor, not a ceiling — I have laid out the case in detail in a previous piece. Iran International, after reviewing classified internal documents, called it the deadliest two-day massacre of street protesters in history. Tiananmen pales beside it. Amnesty International documented security forces firing into crowds, into homes, at a hospital — and rape and sexual violence used against detainees as instruments of interrogation.
And the regime did not fall. Its Supreme Leader was assassinated weeks later in a war; his son now sits in his place; the Islamic Republic still stands. Even the late Soviet Union — a totalitarian state — was no longer executing people for dissent by the 1980s. Tehran shoots wounded protesters in their hospital beds and endures.
How? Not because of the Revolutionary Guard’s tanks. Because this regime solved, decades ago, the one problem every fallen dictatorship failed to solve: it makes sure that 90 million unhappy people never find out, all at once, that they are 90 million.
Why the word, and not the gun
Here is what Western readers keep missing. The regime treats an armed insurgent as a manageable problem and a pop singer as an existential one — and by its own murderous logic, it is right. For two reasons.
The first is mechanical. An armed group is legible. The MEK, Kurdish separatist militias, Baloch insurgents — they have bases, weapons caches, supply lines, command structures. A security state is a machine built to find and destroy exactly that. And an armed group of ten thousand does not solve the coordination problem of ninety million. It can wound the regime. It cannot make every Iranian simultaneously aware that every other Iranian is ready.
A song can. A song fits in a pocket, crosses any checkpoint, and needs no organization to spread. In September 2022, Shervin Hajipour stitched a track together entirely from other people’s tweets — ordinary Iranians listing their reasons for taking to the streets. He called it “Baraye”: “For…” Forty million views in 48 hours. In two days, a 25-year-old with a home studio manufactured what political scientists call common knowledge: not just “I am angry,” but “everyone knows that everyone is angry.” That is the exact chemical precursor of revolution. He was in a Ministry of Intelligence detention cell within days.
The second reason cuts deeper, and it is what separates Tehran from an ordinary dictatorship. A general who seizes power claims to govern best; you can dispute that with facts. The Islamic Republic claims something else entirely: that its jurists rule by divine mandate. Its foundation is not performance but revelation — a monopoly not on power, but on truth itself. Against a state like that, a bullet challenges its forces. A song challenges its premise. This is why the criminal code of Iran speaks the language of theology: “waging war against God,” “corruption on earth,” “insulting the Prophet.” These are not colorful labels. They are precise. A rapper who mocks an imam, a pop singer who tells a woman to uncover her hair, is not committing sedition against a government. He is committing heresy against the axiom on which the entire state rests. And an axiom, unlike an army, cannot survive being laughed at by forty million people.
The Iranian exiles I talk with at demonstrations here in Germany — most of them from the monarchist camp, which despite its name is simply the camp of democrats who want their country back, and which happens to be the friendliest to Israel — tell me versions of the same thing: the regime has always feared the word more than the bullet. Their biographies are the proof.
The machinery
The system built to kill the word is precise, and every component of it has a function.
It begins with identification: the leaders of speech, not the leaders of violence, are the priority targets. Then comes disappearance into a parallel prison system that officially does not exist. Ward 209 of Evin prison is not run by the prison service — it is the Intelligence Ministry’s private dungeon inside the prison, beyond courts and lawyers. I once stood at a rally in Stuttgart next to a woman who survived Evin; when she hears the words “Ward 209,” she is not hearing an abstraction. Below even that are the safe houses: rapper Hamed Fard was taken blindfolded to an unregistered villa and interrogated for days at a site where, on paper, no detention ever occurred. To get him there, the ministry first arrested his father — a hostage, taken to force the son to surrender himself. Hostage-taking of relatives is not an excess of this system. It is a standard tool of it.
Then the body is attacked at the point where the art is made. Mehdi Yarrahi, once a state-decorated pop star, released “Roosarito” — “Your Headscarf” — telling Iranian women to take it off. For that song: Ward 209, a prison sentence, and 74 lashes. The flogging was not symbolic. It was administered on March 5, 2025, and confirmed by his lawyer. A man was whipped 74 times, in the year 2025, for a pop song. Read that sentence twice.
And the final stage is not death but conversion. Hajipour’s court sentenced him to compose a song condemning American crimes — the state does not merely silence the voice, it confiscates it and forces it to sing the state’s tune. During the January crackdown, monitors counted 261 forced confessions broadcast on state television. Two hundred sixty-one human beings, broken in cells, reciting the regime’s script into its cameras. That is not the machine malfunctioning. That is the machine working exactly as designed.
For those who escaped it — Shahin Najafi in Germany, living under police protection after grand ayatollahs ruled his killing a religious duty and a Shia website posted a $100,000 bounty — the machine simply extends across borders.
The man the machine cannot finish
And then there is the case that shows what happens when every component of this machine is applied, at full force, to one human being — and fails.
Toomaj Salehi is not a celebrity. He is a metalworker from Isfahan province who rapped about poverty, corruption and impunity between factory shifts. In September 2021, twelve intelligence agents stormed his home over his songs. He was jailed, then bailed. His answer, while awaiting trial, was to release new songs.
In October 2022, at the height of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, they took him again — violently — and he disappeared into 252 days of solitary confinement, a torture instrument made of pure time. Interrogators broke his leg. They broke the fingers of his hand — a musician’s fingers — and left the fractures to knit crooked. They injected unknown substances into his neck. They staged his mock execution. They wrung a “confession” out of him for state television.
In November 2023 he was released on bail. A broken man’s rational move is silence. Within days, Salehi posted a video describing his torture in detail, named the Intelligence Ministry — and filed a formal criminal complaint against his own torturers. Twelve days after walking out, plainclothes agents beat him in the street, rifle butts and pistol grips to the head, and dragged him back inside without a warrant.
In April 2024, a revolutionary court sentenced him to death for “corruption on earth.” Global outrage forced the Supreme Court to overturn the sentence. In December 2024 he walked free after 753 days. In June 2025 they seized him yet again, on Kish Island. He is still in Iran, still within the machine’s reach — and after every round of torture, there has been another song.
I want to call this what it is. Heroism is not a mood; it is a structure. It is acting when you already know the price — not imagining it, knowing it, because it has already been extracted from your own bones. It is standing alone: no army at your back, no anonymity, your face and address known to the men with the pliers. And it is repetition: doing it again after they have shown you exactly what “again” costs. A soldier’s courage is collective and armed. Salehi’s is solitary and unarmed, and he has paid the tariff four times and walked back into the arena four times. The state keeps having to come back for him because nothing it does to his body stops his voice.
What they would rather sing about
Ask yourself, finally, why these songs exist at all. Why does a gifted generation of Iranian musicians write about prison rape, executions and torture instead of love, women and the beauty of their own country?
Because the regime annexed all of it. In Iran, dancing in public is a crime. A woman’s uncovered hair is a crime. A kiss in the street is a crime. When the ordinary itself is criminalized, there is no such thing as an innocent song — an honest verse about anything true collides with the state. “Baraye,” the anthem that terrified Tehran more than any militia, is not a call to arms. It is a list of stolen ordinary things: dancing in the street, an unafraid embrace, an ordinary life. The most subversive text in the country is an inventory of normality.
These musicians did not choose politics over love. The regime made love illegal, and they refused to lie about it. Every song about torture is, at bottom, a song about the right to one day write songs about nothing at all.
In the West, a protest song is a playlist. Nobody thinks of it as a potential crime, because in a free society it isn’t one. In Iran, the regime has spent 47 years teaching — with broken fingers, with lashes, with hospital-bed executions — a lesson we have forgotten: a song is the most dangerous weapon a captive nation has. The Islamic Republic believes this absolutely.
It is the one thing the regime and I agree on.
