A feminist defence of a third way that rejects both foreign aggression and the Islamic Republic’s repression, refusing to sacrifice freedom to geopolitics.
I have just finished reading “Denying the Flame Does Not Extinguish the Fire,” by Nikzad Zanganeh, an independent researcher and translator whose research includes Marxist feminism, and Mihan Tari, the Persian translator of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Ashes of Gramsci. It is an article that left me thinking deeply and bewildered by many of its arguments.
The political world in this article is viewed from a single centre of gravity: “imperialism.” For its authors, and for those who regard “resistance” and the “Axis of Resistance” as the principal answer to imperialist domination, war, sanctions, military intervention and the economic domination exercised by Western powers are all interconnected components of a global structure.
It is true that the United States, Israel and their allies have a long record of coups, wars, sanctions, occupations and support for repressive governments across the Middle East. No emancipatory politics can afford to erase this history. The problem begins when recognising structures of domination becomes a map for dividing the entire world into two absolute camps: “domination” and “resistance.” It reproduces the familiar security-state logic that has been shouted at us for years: “Either you are with them or you are with us.”
On this map, the Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, Hamas and their allied forces in Iraq and Yemen occupy the side of “resistance,” while the United States, Israel and their allies occupy the side of imperialism. Strangely, every other political, civil and social force is then judged according to its relationship to these two poles.
The article goes so far as to portray a large section of the Iranian left as an “arm of imperialism” because it refuses to submit to this binary. As a feminist and a women’s rights activist, I am confronted here with an enormous question: where, on this black-and-white map, are the “people”? More specifically, where are women? This is precisely where, in so many political discourses, “the country,” “the state” and “territorial integrity” come to replace the people themselves.
The authors place fundamental value on what they call “national independence”: control over resources, preservation of territorial integrity, resistance to foreign intervention and opposition to powers seeking to impose their will on a country. Many of us would certainly agree that these things matter.
What disappears, however, is the fundamental distinction between the “national independence” of a state and the independence, freedom and agency of the people living within its borders.
How could those of us who have spent years living under the Islamic Republic’s authoritarian and repressive rule overlook this distinction? A government can resist foreign domination while simultaneously repressing, torturing and executing its own citizens.
A country’s borders can be independent while the people living within them never experience even a moment of freedom or independence themselves.
How could we, as women in Iran, not know this in every fibre of our being? A country may have no foreign army patrolling its streets, while its own police and security forces beat and kill Jina (Mahsa) Amini—the 22-year-old Kurdish woman whose death in morality-police custody in September 2022 sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising—and countless other women like her over what they wear.
And although a country such as Iran may retain control over its natural resources rather than handing them to foreign powers, the share received by much of its population can still be poverty, hunger and destitution.
Where, in this sloganised version of “national independence,” is the independence of the people themselves?
When Women’s Freedom Is Once Again Deferred Until Later
What troubled and astonished me most while reading the article was the expectation, once again, that women should define themselves and their demands within some larger political project.
One day it was the revolution. Another day, the eight-year Iran–Iraq War. Then it was preserving the system, then territorial integrity. Today, it is the struggle against imperialism and the defence of “resistance.”
My disbelief comes directly from the article’s own argument. In its conclusion, the authors acknowledge the necessity of criticising the Islamic Republic’s domestic policies, only to immediately impose a limit on that criticism: human rights demands and critiques must not become instruments for weakening “national independence and anti-imperialism.”
In the same section, they defend “actually existing resistance” and accuse those on the left who criticise violence committed in the name of resistance and call for peace of inadvertently helping to reproduce domination under conditions of unequal power.
It is the familiar logic of “the current sensitive situation”—the logic that has repeatedly told women that our demands must wait until some supposedly more important problem has been resolved.
This is precisely the problem. Once preserving national independence and fighting imperialism become the standards against which every other demand must be measured, women’s demands are no longer judged according to their own legitimacy. Instead, they are evaluated according to whether they help or hinder the anti-imperialist project.
When the Islamic Republic, despite all the criticisms supposedly directed at it, is described as “the most enduring anti-imperialist state in West Asia,” how can we not worry that domestic repression will be judged not according to the suffering it inflicts on people—especially women—but according to whether criticism of that repression might weaken a government that defines itself through confrontation with the United States and Israel?
Iranian women, particularly since the progressive Woman, Life, Freedom movement, have repeatedly made clear that we do not want our freedom and independence reduced to an insignificant clause or footnote appended to some larger political project.
Our opposition to the Islamic Republic is neither the product of US or Israeli propaganda nor evidence of ignorance about the history of imperialism.
It is rooted in our lived experience as women whose bodies and psyches bear the scars of the Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism—a state that, from its earliest days, imposed its domination over women’s bodies, lives and presence in society.
Why Must We Choose One?
This brings me to the section of the article that, for me, makes the necessity of a “third way” even clearer: its criticism of the Guardian open letter in solidarity with political prisoners in Iran, signed by figures including Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi and other left-wing, anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist thinkers and activists.
The letter describes Iran’s political prisoners as caught between “two blades of a scissors”: on one side, the Islamic Republic’s imprisonment, torture, executions and repression; on the other, war, bombardment and sanctions imposed by powers claiming to be confronting that same Islamic Republic.
The letter calls simultaneously for an end to executions and the release of political prisoners, and for an end to the US-Israeli war and sanctions.
But “Denying the Flame Does Not Extinguish the Fire” sharply rejects this formulation. Its authors argue that placing the Islamic Republic’s repression and imperialist aggression on opposite blades of the same scissors obscures the historical and qualitative differences between these forms of power and risks creating an equivalence between a state under attack and the force attacking it.
I believe the central error lies precisely here: in assuming that seeing both blades of the scissors at the same time means treating them as equivalent.
For those of us who defend a third way, simultaneously opposing domestic authoritarianism and foreign aggression has never meant claiming that their nature, power or scale are identical.
As a woman and as a human being I do not need to ignore either form of violence in order to understand that the bombing of a country by the United States or Israel is not the same as arresting a woman because of what she wears, torturing a political prisoner or executing a young protester.
Their histories, power, methods and responsibilities are not the same. But those of us caught between them should not be required to deny the suffering inflicted by one in order to prove our opposition to the other.
For me, this is precisely what makes the open letter important. Its political subject is neither the Islamic Republic, nor the United States, nor Israel. Its subject is the people.
It is about political prisoners who are tortured inside the Islamic Republic’s prisons while, at the same time, watching the missiles of a foreign state fly over their heads.
What is the third way if not precisely this: seeing people who are simultaneously subjected to domestic authoritarianism and foreign violence, without allowing either to disappear behind the other?
Why should a woman who has spent years fighting the Islamic Republic’s discriminatory laws be cast as a defender of the Islamic Republic simply because she says, “I oppose an Israeli attack on Iran”?
And by what logic does that same woman become an “arm of imperialism” if, in the midst of war, she continues to oppose compulsory hijab, imprisonment, executions and repression?
This is where “No to war, no to the Islamic Republic” acquires its meaning.
This position does not equate the Islamic Republic with the United States and Israel. Nor is it an attempt to stand at an equal distance from them. The point is not to position “the people” at some mathematically equal distance between two powers.
The third way is precisely a refusal to choose between powers that, in different ways, disregard people’s agency and their right to determine their own future.
And if we are going to speak of “resistance,” we cannot restrict that word to resistance against foreign powers while ignoring resistance to domestic repression—a power that has extended itself into our homes, over our bodies and psyches, and into the most intimate aspects of our lives.
For me, as a feminist and as a woman who has endured years of repression by the Islamic Republic, and who today is barred from returning to my own country simply because of my thoughts and beliefs—a country whose “national independence” has now been turned into such an inviolable red line—no flag is sacred enough to conceal the blood unjustly spilled behind it.
No “resistance” is sacred enough to be beyond questioning.
And no form of “independence” is worth defending if the women and people of that country are required, in order to preserve it, to surrender their own independence, freedom and lives.
“No to war, no to the Islamic Republic” is not a position we have chosen out of neutrality. It is a position we cannot avoid if we refuse to oppose one form of domination by turning a blind eye to another.
