An Iranian woman studying abroad criticises those in the Diaspora urging more patience and diplomacy with the Islamic Republic of Iran. ‘The Diaspora’s debate often feels like a luxury of abstraction. But for those of us who grew up in a country where your legal value is exactly half that of a man, the stakes are not theoretical.’ She argues that ‘while this establishment debates historical ghosts from the safety of Western universities, the Iranians living under the Islamic Republic are speaking a different language. They are not asking for a history lesson. They are asking for an exit.
TO DANCE WAS FORBIDDEN. TO SING WAS FORBIDDEN. TO LOVE WAS FORBIDDEN.
I left Iran; not as a child carried out by parents fleeing a revolution, but as an adult who made a deliberate choice – because the weight of daily life under the Islamic Republic had become impossible to carry. I left for professional opportunity, for personal freedom, for safety. I left knowing exactly what I was leaving and why. My final memory of leaving was not a sentimental one. It was the border. Guards searching my most intimate garments – methodically, without apology – to ensure I carried nothing but basic hygiene products. That is how the Islamic Republic says goodbye to its women. I moved overseas to pursue studies in my area of research – a discipline built on the morality of democracy and the intellectual’s obligation to speak truth. It is therefore agonising to watch, from here, how the Diaspora is failing the people it claims to represent.
A friend of mine in France – someone who has been a steady presence during the hard days for so many of us living far from home – recently shared a series of articles concerning the future of Iran. He is not Iranian, but he reads closely, and he sent them wanting to understand. Most were the standard fare of policy and posture, but one by Reza Aslan required a longer, more deliberate response. It is more than just an op-ed; it is a clinical example of how institutional advocacy can quietly replace the very voices it claims to defend.
Aslan argues that ‘the best way to support Iranians struggling against authoritarian rule’ is through ‘engagement, diplomacy, cultural exchange’ – and that ‘durable change, if it comes, will most likely emerge from the slow accumulation of pressure inside the country, not from the sudden imposition of force from outside.’ He warns against what he calls the ‘old fantasy of America as savior,’ and dismisses those in the Diaspora who welcome external pressure as people whose ‘desire for liberation has outrun memory.’ His framework rests on a tidy historical binary: the 1909 sacrifice of Howard Baskerville [promoting the Persian Constitutional Revolution] versus the 1953 intervention of Kermit Roosevelt [to replace Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh]. For decades, a particular class of Diaspora intellectuals has used these names as the poles of their identity: solidarity versus intervention. Aslan is not alone in this posture. Trita Parsi, the founder of the National Iranian American Council, has built an entire institutional career on the same foundation. Vali Nasr, one of the most prominent Iranian-American foreign policy voices, has consistently arrived at the same destination. Together they represent not a fringe but an establishment – credentialed, media-friendly, institutionally connected. But they do not represent the Iranian Diaspora. The majority of Iranians abroad – and the overwhelming evidence of what Iranians inside the country are actually saying – tell a fundamentally different story.
While this establishment debates historical ghosts from the safety of Western universities, the Iranians living under the Islamic Republic are speaking a different language. They are not asking for a history lesson. They are asking for an exit.
THE GRINDING EROSION OF THE SELF
The Diaspora’s debate often feels like a luxury of abstraction. But for those of us who grew up in a country where your legal value is exactly half that of a man, the stakes are not theoretical. I come from a place where you cannot style your hair as you wish, or leave the country without a husband’s or father’s permission; where a woman’s life, if taken, is compensated at exactly half the rate of a man’s; where you could not share your opinion, your vision, your politics – not even inside a university classroom.
But I want to be clear: these are the small things. The least important things, when we speak of fundamental freedom.
In the early days of the current conflict, I was speaking to my family in Tehran a hundred times a day. Voice messages at midnight, calls between sirens, photographs sent to prove that someone was still standing. Then the internet went down. Then the lines went silent. That silence – the sudden disappearance of a hundred daily connections – is what war means when it is not abstract. Not strategy. Not history. A phone that stops ringing.
Recently, the Iranian women’s national football team stood in silence as the country’s anthem played before their Asian Cup match in Australia. Not a single player sang. Their coach watched from the sidelines with a quiet smile. Within hours, a presenter on Iranian state television called them wartime traitors and warned they would be ‘dealt with more severely.’ In their next match, the players sang the anthem and performed a military salute. Observers described them as being under heavy security, ‘basically prisoners.’ That shift from silence to salute was not a change of heart. It was the visible signature of coercion. FIFPRO, the global players’ union, raised urgent concerns – reporting they were ‘unable to get in touch with the players,’ a situation described as ‘incredibly concerning.’ Five players – Zahra Ghanbari, Mona Hamoudi, Fatemeh Pasandideh, Zahra Sarbali Alishah, and Atefeh Ramezanizadeh – have since been granted humanitarian visas by Australia. These are women who represented their country on a world stage and faced the choice between silence and survival.
This is the regime Aslan and others ask us to be patient with.
The European intellectual tradition, represented by Camus, Fanon, Sartre and the broader legacy of the engaged intellectual, holds that freedom is not a gift but a right that must be defended, and that the role of the intellectual is to stand unambiguously on the side of the oppressed. From this perspective, it is troubling to see Emmanuel Macron, the self-appointed guardian of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, respond to the strikes on Iran not with solidarity for the Iranian people but with a legal brief, condemning the action as a violation of international law, calling for a ceasefire, and speaking the language of procedure rather than that of human dignity. This is precisely what Aslan’s framework produces when applied at scale: not solidarity, but process; not courage, but positioning. At a time when the women of Iran are risking their lives for freedom on football pitches and in city streets, the least a Western leader who presents himself as a defender of democratic principles could offer is something more than a procedural objection.
THE HELP THAT NEVER ARRIVED
No patriot defends war. Far from home, as I watch the red sky of Tehran through videos shared from inside, I can barely breathe. I am terrified for my country. In the last two weeks I have tried to reach my family. Before the internet had been cut, the calls were still connected, but the conversation stayed carefully on the surface – studies, weather, ordinary things. The lines were monitored and everyone knew it. So we had developed our own language. I asked how the party was going. My mother told me whether the guests were behaving. Neither of us said the word war. Neither of us needed to. She had lived under this regime long enough that surveillance had become a second instinct – she did not need secret words to transfer the weight of what she could not say. A slight shift in her voice, a pause that lasted a half-second too long, a brightness that was performed rather than felt. I understood everything. That is what four decades of living under a surveillance state produced: not silence, but a generation of people who had learned to speak in frequencies the regime could not intercept.
When I read Aslan’s careful, measured prose – his patient counsel to wait, to trust the process, to let history take its course – I think of my mother’s voice, and the party that is not a party. He is writing policy. She is living inside it.
Those same videos from inside Iran show people thanking the Diaspora for speaking. In that moment, the question of what I personally want becomes irrelevant. Who am I – someone who left for a better life – to decide what is tolerable for those who stayed? The distance between us and the ground is real, and we should be honest about it. That honesty does not mean silence. It means knowing our role.
We must speak for all those who lost their lives calling for help in January massacres – the help that never arrived for them. These are the civilians who stepped into the line of fire with the hope of liberty, only to be left alone while the Diaspora argued over the nuances of diplomacy.
THE ECHO VS. THE ARCHITECT
This is the core of the failure: the Diaspora has mistaken itself for the architect of Iran’s future when our only legitimate role is to be its echo.
Aslan’s piece carries an institutional history he does not disclose. For two decades he sat on the board of an organisation defined by its opposition to external pressure on the regime. He resigned from that board in October 2022, at the height of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, saying the organisation’s reputation had become a barrier. The resignation is itself a confession – it confirms exactly what critics had argued. And it did not change his conclusions. A man with a twenty-year record of arguing for diplomacy is writing op-eds arguing for diplomacy, without telling his readers that this has always been his position. That is not a grieving exile’s meditation. It is a policy position wearing the clothes of memory.
This paternalism is most visible in what Aslan calls dismissing ‘exiled princes essentially claiming a birthright to rule.’ When millions of Iranians – inside and outside the country – invoke the name of Reza Pahlavi, they are not necessarily asking for a return to 1978. They are asking for a disruption of the present. I am not here to direct the reader toward any conclusion about Pahlavi or about what form Iran’s future should take. That is precisely the point: it is not my conclusion to direct. What I will say is this: as far back as a 1995 interview, Pahlavi stated that he was ‘fighting so that you will have the right, one day, to vote against me.’ That is not a birthright claim. That is a democratic position. To dismiss it without engagement is not analysis. It is a refusal to listen – and it tells us far more about the politics of the person refusing than about the people being ignored.
A serious advocate does not paternalistically manage the expectations of those managing real risk. They do not override the conclusions of the oppressed with the wisdom of the comfortable.
Iran’s future will be decided by those who are there now. By the women who stood in silence on a football pitch in Australia and faced the consequences. By the students who cannot leave. By the woman whose legal value is written into law as half a man’s. By the civilians who came out into the streets with nothing but the hope that this time help would arrive and were viciously gunned down.
Those of us in the Diaspora owe them a transparency that matches their courage. We must stop dressing our institutional positions in the language of loss and start speaking the language of truth.
They are still waiting. The least we can do is be honest about why.
And so, Mr. Aslan, I leave you with a question – not mine, but Iranians asking if you think we are afraid of death on the path to freedom:
سی صد گل سرخ و یک گل نصرانی –ما را ز سر بریده میترسانی؟
Three hundred red roses and one wild rose – and you think a severed head frightens me?
