Damascus, Tehran Once Again: Al-Jolani, a Disciple of Khomeini’s School
How did Syrians wake up one morning, after celebrating Bashar al-Assad’s flight, only to find themselves in Tehran? Did they escape the nightmare of barrel bombs merely to discover the specter of Wilayat al-Faqih — the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist — casting its shadow over the Umayyad Mosque? Can al-Jolani defeat Iran politically, only to borrow its instruments of power to govern Syrians? Are we comparing two religious sects in two different countries, or two historical moments in which Islamist opposition movements rise to power, armed with exclusionary ideologies determined to reshape society in their own image? After all, do political ideologies always travel under their original passports, or do they travel through the functions they perform?
Al-Jolani denounces Iran in his rhetoric, yet appears determined to Islamize Syrian society along the lines of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. In other words, he publicly rejects Tehran while quietly adopting its algorithms of control: a comprehensive blueprint for turning religion into a legislative and administrative apparatus that dismantles the social fabric. Public morality becomes a state project rather than a matter of individual choice, while virtue is transformed from a social value into a line item in the state budget and a component of its bureaucratic structure. This is the political economy of ideology: when faith is institutionalized as a machinery of moral surveillance designed to discipline human beings rather than liberate them.
The political history of the Middle East is drenched in blood and ashes. Victors, regardless of their names or ideologies, seem repeatedly seduced by ready-made models of power. Iran, which devoured much of the Arab East through its slogans and expansionist ambitions, has left behind a sectarian-transcending “instruction manual” for controlling minds. When Syrian political Islam looks toward Tehran, it does so through two contradictory lenses: one sees a sectarian adversary, while the other sees an inspiration — a regime that has demonstrated how ideology can bring an entire society of 80 million people under its control. Al-Jolani appears captivated by the allure of the Iranian experiment.
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This is the savage pragmatism of ideology. Moral policing is cheaper than transitional justice, faster than reconstruction, and easier than holding the corruption networks of the war economy accountable.
We are witnessing an almost identical visual and symbolic spectacle: the state appoints itself guardian of public morality, measuring the length of women’s clothing while ignoring the length of queues for bread, cooking gas, and heating fuel. When virtue becomes public policy, a new black market emerges: the black market of private life. People do not disappear; they simply retreat into secrecy. When a state proves incapable of building the future, it may instead devote itself to manufacturing citizens suited to the past. This is precisely what theocratic states do.
Perhaps the most significant difference between Syria and Iran lies not merely in religious denomination, but in society’s capacity to resist the model imposed upon it. An attempt to force Syrian society into a single ideological mold may therefore produce not a cohesive Islamic society, but a state locked in perpetual conflict with its own people, struggling endlessly to bend them into submission. It is as though we are witnessing a process of social sorting reminiscent of the Inquisition, in which citizens are melted down and recast in the ideological furnaces inherited from al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Perhaps the tragedy of revolutions is that they topple the dictator’s statue but forget the pedestal on which it stood. The resulting irony may prove crueler than anything that came before: Syrians may finally have brought down the statues of both Assads, father and son, only to find themselves standing in a long queue to choose who will occupy the pedestal next.
Between a nationalist Baathist ideology that ruled for sixty years and a Salafi-jihadist ideology that has governed for nearly two, Syrians are being moved from a military barracks ruled by fear of conspiracy to a closed religious enclave governed by terror of sin — from a repressive, totalitarian republic of the twentieth century to a medieval-style Salafi emirate.
