Prologue — The Voice Behind Him

It happens on a gray Saturday in Austin, in a café that takes coffee more seriously than most countries take elections.

Kian is doing what exiles do when they want to feel normal: pretending to work. A Jupyter notebook open, code cells half-finished, Slack blinking in another tab. He has almost convinced himself this is another weekend in another city when he hears it.

Persian.Loud Persian.Village-heavy Persian.

Two tables behind him.

“Didi Munich ro? Cheghadr crowd! Reza Pahlavi khodesh raft ro stage…”

He doesn’t turn around. The words draw the picture: a sea of Lion-and-Sun flags, a man on a stage in a winter coat, people chanting the name of the son of the king their parents overthrew. Someone filming vertically. Someone live-streaming for an audience of fifty.

The man behind him slips into broken English—“…you know, world is finally seeing…”—then slides back to Persian with the confidence of someone who has never had to read his accent in a stranger’s eyes.

They move on to Trump. They speak his name like a handle on a machine far above their heads. He hits, they say. He doesn’t play games. He will finally “finish this regime.” Their tone is half gossip, half liturgy—the way Iranians talk about foreign power when they are tired of their own.

Kian stares at his screen. The code blurs.

A sentence condenses in his mind, heavy and precise:

Neanderthals.

He doesn’t say it aloud. It pulses privately in his skull, a verdict with no right of appeal. He lowers his laptop volume to hear them better. If he is going to despise, he wants every detail.

I — The Country That Taught Him to Hate God

Kian is born in a country where God wears a uniform.

In school, Islam arrives as infrastructure. The day begins with prayer over the loudspeaker, recited in a tone that makes sacred words sound like a list of regulations.

His real instruction comes every Muharram.

Year after year, the same set: black banners, green flags, a man with a microphone on a plastic stage rehearsing Karbala like state-sponsored theater.

Husayn, righteous and outnumbered. Yazid, corrupt and victorious. Thirst, betrayal, martyrdom. The moral geometry is so clean it feels childish. We are the righteous. They are the wicked. We cry. We confirm the story. We repeat.

What he feels is not awe. It’s a crawling discomfort in his skin. He watches grown men whose faces twitch on cue, women whose wails sharpen when new people arrive, a reciter whose voice always cracks on the same syllable. The room smells of sweat and old speakers and forced feeling.

If he doesn’t cry, he is cold.If he doesn’t attend, he is suspect.If he questions the script, he is asking for attention from the wrong people.

He makes one serious attempt to feel what he is supposed to feel. He closes his eyes, pictures sand and tents and blood. His chest stays still. The only real sensation is the weight of the crowd’s gaze on his face, checking for tears.

The first time he sees the “guidance patrol” stop a woman for showing too much hair, he feels shame rise like heat, but it has nowhere to go. Shame for her. Shame for himself. Shame for living in a place where boys with badges can bark at his sister.

The Islam of his childhood is not a search. It is a schedule. Assemblies, sermons, uniforms, orders. The word “God” becomes tangled in the nerves that tighten his jaw and shoulders.

He learns early that whatever holiness is, it does not live in that tone of voice.

II — The First Constitution in the Desert

Years later, after airports, visas, and a new language, he tries something on a quiet night that would have been dangerous in his old life: he reads the story of Islam the way you read any other rise to power.

He has a mug beside him, a lamp, a laptop with too many tabs open. He scrolls through maps and timelines and feels something disturbing and familiar—like reading his own medical chart after years of being told to stop complaining.

Arabia in the seventh century is a patchwork of tribes. Blood debts, raids, local gods, caravan tolls. Far away, two great empires grind each other down: Byzantium and the Sasanians, worlds of tax codes and archives and road networks.

Muhammad appears first as a preacher in Mecca, a threat to the local economy of idols and shrines. Then he becomes the axis of a community in Medina. Authority gathers. Rules follow. Revelation expands from metaphysics into administration. Inheritance, contracts, war and peace—God starts speaking like a government.

Then the armies move.

Qadisiyyah, Nahavand—names he has seen in school as triumphs of faith, now read like symptoms of imperial exhaustion. The Sasanian army breaks. Ctesiphon falls. The king flees and dies on the run. An old state, with all its routes and ledgers and compromises, collapses in a handful of campaigns and bargains.

He feels a strange nausea reading it. He’d been taught it as destiny. On the screen in front of him it looks like what happens when a system has been fighting too long and somebody younger and hungrier shows up.

The conversion part is slower. Cities revolt. Garrisons are attacked. Local religion survives in pieces. Zoroastrians negotiate taxes, then slowly lose ground. Some leave for India. Some stay and watch their status erode, inch by inch.

Centuries later, the Safavids decide Iran will be Twelver Shia and hammer that choice into everyone’s calendar. Clerics gain rank. Shrines gain centrality. Borders are drawn in doctrine.

Beneath all of that, the language in Kian’s mouth still carries older roots.

Mādar, pedar, barādar—mother, father, brother. Sounds that have more in common with Sanskrit and French than with Arabic. He remembers his grandmother’s accent, the way she said these words, the way they felt safe in his throat. The realization lands: the sentence itself is older than the conquerors who used God’s name as a banner.

Nowruz reinforces the thought. Sabzeh, sib, sir, serkeh, sekkeh, samanu, somāq on the table every spring, the equinox arriving without consulting ministries. In his parents’ living room, a Qur’an sits next to a volume of Hafez on the Haft-Seen cloth like two reluctant coworkers forced to share a desk. The state can shout Islam through loudspeakers; the calendar shrugs and keeps its own time.

He sits back from the screen. The anger he feels is less about ancient battles than about continuity: a chain of men who used God and law to reorder other people’s lives, a chain that runs from deserts and courts into his own childhood classroom.

The realization doesn’t free him. It just makes his contempt older.

III — The Local God

Muhammad is the distant architect in Kian’s private indictment. Khomeini is the local contractor who brings the blueprints into his street.

The school version of the story paints in thick lines. Shah: tyrant. People: heroic. Exiled cleric: savior. The photographs are staged to feel inevitable—crowds, fists, flags, a plane landing with history on board.

In the apartment, the story looks smaller and meaner. Food lines. Quiet arguments that stop when a child walks in. Relatives who are suddenly “abroad” or “busy” and never fully reappear. News read between the lines because the lines themselves are lies.

The revolution was a broad front for a brief moment—Islamists, Marxists, students, nationalists, monarchists with better timing, all colliding. Then the clerical network, with its mosques and seminaries and habit of hierarchy, does what hierarchies do when power is loose on the floor.

Velayat-e faqih puts a jurist at the summit. Councils appear that can decide who may even approach a ballot. Courts inherit the language of sin and salvation. Friday sermons arrive through state channels. Islam sits on the country like a lid.

Kian feels the weight through his sister’s hair.

She grows up learning to map the city by risk. One street tolerates a loose scarf; another is patrolled by boys on motorbikes. Shop windows are mirrors and surveillance devices. The difference between a “good girl” and a “problem” is two fingers’ width of forehead.

The first time a patrol yells at her, something in him twists. Rage, shame, impotence. The state has declared that his sister’s body is an announcement and that random young men are entitled to correct it.

He also absorbs something more corrosive. Once God’s name sits at the top of every institution, every humiliation in daily life drifts upward. Inflation, shortages, corruption, war, incompetence—none of it can be quarantined as “just politics” because officials keep insisting it is Islam in action.

When the state says it rules for God, every failure becomes theological.

The Republic plows ahead anyway, certain that slogans can outshout lived experience.

IV — Exile and the Art of Being Embarrassed

Leaving happens in steps too small to look like a break from the outside: an exam, a scholarship email, a visa interview, a flight. The big feeling arrives later, in a subway somewhere in Europe, when he realizes no wall is watching him.

He starts collecting new grammars.

Academic English first, then office English, then the soft phrases of performance reviews. He learns how to describe Iran in a way that makes Western faces settle: authoritarian system, religious oversight, constrained elections, sanctions pressure. He learns which adjectives trigger sympathy, which trigger boredom, which trigger fear.

He likes traffic laws that talk about speed and weight instead of modesty and God. He likes police with no opinion about his mother’s hair. He likes the possibility of being angry at a government without feeling accused of blasphemy.

Then he meets other Iranians abroad.

At first, they are a relief. The jokes land without subtitles. Complaints about conscription, electricity cuts, school indoctrination find an echo. There is a shared understanding of how to swear in Farsi in a way no translation can capture.

Then comes the political invitation: a rally.

The poster is bad design. The intention is serious. GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION. A march route. A schedule. A list of speakers.

He goes.

On the street, he sees a familiar mix: students, families, older men with plastic bags, professionals in technical jackets. Flags everywhere. Signs. Chants of “Woman, Life, Freedom” that shake something honest in his chest, because he knows what it costs women inside Iran to walk with hair in the wind.

Then, as the crowd warms up, other words surface.

“Reza Shah, ruhat shad.” “Reza Pahlavi, biya, biya.”

He feels like he’s watching a country reach for an old habit: when the present hurts, summon a father from the past. Any father. A king will do.

He scans the faces. Some are clearly performing for cameras, angling their grief toward the nearest lens. Others are sincere in a way that scares him more. They are too ready to believe that a change of face at the top—a prince, a president, a foreign general—will fix the architecture beneath.

He hears Trump’s name tossed around here too, carried on the same energy as the monarch’s. The story is always simple: someone powerful will hurt the regime just right and finally everything will be fine.

He knows what pressure does. He remembers price shocks from sanctions, the way medicine disappears, the way flights out become fantasies. He has watched other countries turned into example and warning, a few days of footage, then a decade of rubble.

He has no trouble imagining security councils and cabinets in distant capitals where a damaged Iran is an acceptable outcome. Weakened, busy with its own fires, bleeding doctors and engineers through quiet airports—still technically whole on a map, but easy to manage.

What makes him clench his teeth in that procession is not that people want the regime gone. He wants that more than they can shout. It’s the way they talk about force, as if violence from the sky arrives with a conscience and a filter.

Embarrassment becomes chronic. Loud Farsi in public triggers a full-body flinch. His own language starts to sound to him like a risk.

V — The Neanderthal Moment

All of this sits behind the coffee shop scene like a pressure gradient.

The couple behind him fit right into that mental file. Slightly overdressed, phones face-up, talking with the entitlement of people who assume they’re interesting. They scroll through photos from Munich: big crowds, winter coats, flags, a man on a stage. Each picture is narrated out loud, a litany of proof that “the world is finally seeing us.”

Then the man’s voice dips lower, more intense. Trump will fix this, he says. He will show strength. He will stop them. Just wait. It’s only a matter of time.

Kian feels the old constriction in his chest, the one he used to get when state TV announced “new developments” with foreign powers. Even here, with oat milk and wifi, the word “strike” makes his nervous system brace.

Neanderthals.

The thought is clean and brutal. He means a specific posture: people who have lived so long under someone else’s boot that they now fantasize about a bigger boot choosing better targets. People who talk about airstrikes from safe cities as if explosives have opinions.

For a few seconds, that judgment steadies him. I got out. I’m not them. I don’t chant for jets. I don’t beg old fathers or new ones to fix what my country refused to build.

Then he looks down at his empty notebook cell. The satisfaction doesn’t know what to do with itself. The cursor keeps blinking.

VI — What Contempt Is Hiding

Contempt feels like certainty while you’re inside it. It lifts you above the group you came from and lets you speak about them like a zoologist.

Underneath, something else seethes.

For Kian, it is grief refusing to name itself.

He is furious that exiles march under flags for a prince whose father’s system failed and for a foreign president whose idea of consequence is ratings. Under that fury lies a quieter ache: a wish that his people had built something sturdier than faces—institutions that could carry conflict without collapsing.

He is repulsed by Muharram theatrics, by state funeral shows, by staged tears. Under that repulsion sits a memory of why ritual ever mattered in the first place: humans trying to hold loss. The regime turned that into programming. The grief curdled.

He cringes at village accents in American spaces. Under the cringe is a more humiliating thought: that if his life had bent a little differently, he might have been the man in the leather jacket mispronouncing “democracy” on television. His new ease with Western syntax becomes a class marker he can hide behind.

Before customs stamped his passport, he had already left internally. Bare-minimum compliance, maximum distance. Go to the rally, keep your thoughts to yourself. Sit through the sermon, let your belief walk out. Do the exam, ignore the ideology wrapped around the questions.

The Republic taught him the difference between the sacred and the people who claim to manage it. That lesson hardened into a reflex: whenever someone says they speak for God, for the nation, for “our people,” he reaches for the door.

He did not escape through philosophy. He was pushed out by the police.

Once that sinks in, the border between “me” and “them” loses its clean edge. They were shaped by the same pressures. Some stayed, some left, some shouted, some shut down. He built a story where this divergence proved superiority. The story has kept him warm. It also keeps him alone.

VII — Structure and Ruin

It is tempting to say Iranians are simply bad at politics. Tempting because it turns a tangle of history into a character flaw.

Memory gets in the way.

This population forced a shah to sign a constitution once. It elected a prime minister who tried to bring oil policy under national control. It filled streets and ballot boxes for reform movements that demanded rules strong enough to hold both monarchy and clerics in check. It has sent its children out into the world to run hospitals, labs, engineering teams.

The pattern that repeats is interruption.

Every time a stretch of history begins where habits of self-government could form, something breaks it—coup, palace, revolution, war, purge, sanctions. Parties evaporate or are banned. Courts are bent. Parliaments become stages. People learn cycles instead of continuity.

Oil reinforces the worst habits. A state that can pull wealth out of the ground does not need citizens as partners, only as scenery and, occasionally, as a crowd. Sanctions twist this further, concentrating survival around those closest to power. Everyone else is told their hunger defends something holy.

On top of this, foreign pressure works like a slow poison. Each new threat, each round of “options” and “messages,” lands first on pharmacies and shops and only much later on palaces, if it ever reaches them at all. Some neighboring governments and faraway allies quietly accept this as a reasonable equilibrium: Iran too bruised to project strength, busy watching its own blood pressure.

Kian knows this in his body, not from policy papers. He has lived the jumpiness that comes with breaking news. He has seen what “sanctions tightening” does to a family’s grocery list. When exiles act as if more punishment from abroad is a magic key, he hears children who never learned what pain actually reaches.

His contempt rushes in to label them stupid. A slower thought follows: they are reaching for whatever lever they can see, raised on state lies about the outside world and now overcorrecting towards faith in another kind of power.

Both stories—Tehran’s and the diaspora’s—treat Iranians as objects in someone else’s strategy.

VIII — Coda: Shared Embarrassment

A week after the coffee shop scene, a video from Munich slides into his feed.

The thumbnail is standard: flags, a crowd, winter coats. He is about to flick it away when he notices the caption: Listen to her.

In the middle of the clip, they’ve cut to a young woman giving a short interview. No flag in her hand. No chanting. Just a tight jaw and clear German-accented English.

“I’m tired of kings and ayatollahs and saviors,” she says. “I just want a government that doesn’t treat us like children.”

That’s it. No promise that history is turning. No appeal to Western power. Just a human-scale demand.

Kian watches it twice.

The sentence feels like it could have come out of his own mouth in another timeline. Different coat, different street, same fatigue. That recognition annoys him. It also cracks something.

He closes the video and sits with the irritation. The crowd in Munich is no longer a single block of fools in his mind. It becomes messier: some there for the photo, some there to scream, some there because they have no other tool, some there because they’re trying, in their own way, to grow up.

On another gray Saturday, in the same Austin café, he hears Persian again. This time it’s a group of younger people, voices lower, sentences sliding between Farsi and English. They are arguing about sanctions, war, boycotts, who really cares about Iran, whether any of this reaches the people who decide.

One of them says, “Man dige hich kasi ro bala saram nemikhām. Na shah, na rahbar, na prince. Faghat kasi ke har rooz zendegim-o nazane khāk.” I don’t want anyone above me anymore—no king, no leader, no prince. I just want someone who doesn’t smash my life into the dirt every day.

He doesn’t turn around. He lets the words do their work.

The old reflex is still there. Certain vowels still make him brace. He still has no interest in marching under anybody’s symbol. He still cannot forgive the way religion and power were fused and poured over his childhood.

The word Neanderthals has dulled though. It feels less like truth and more like armor he has been using against his own sense of belonging.

He opens a new document and writes a single line:

A faith protected by police has already admitted it cannot persuade.

He reads it back and leaves it untouched. He isn’t entirely sure which faith he means—the state’s, the diaspora’s, or his own belief that he has finally climbed free of the people who made him.

The cursor waits at the end of the sentence.

Outside, deadlines and threats and deals move across maps he will never see. Inside, in a room full of laptops and quiet arguments, he sits with a harder fact than contempt ever offered him:

He is embarrassed by his people.They are embarrassed by what has been done to them.

Those are different things.They still share the same language.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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