All revolutions have heroes: real and imaginary, rising from the ground and foisted from above, fallible and flawless. Successful revolutions, however, succeed without and despite these heroes. They succeed because the will to change emerges from those corners where heroism is not about podiums or pedestals but an exigency of everyday existence.
Women of Iran have been existing in these very corners.
Whether Iran will see the overthrow of the Ayatollah regime soon does not even matter at the moment. What is writ large in the visuals trickling out despite the state-imposed digital blackout in Iran is that the common Iranian has crossed the Rubicon. The society is unlikely to go back to the old ways of the Islamic militias and state authorities indulging in everyday terrorism.
Maybe the regime won't fall unless the US intervenes with banknotes or bombs or both. It won't be a terrible thing. Revolutions abetted militarily by other countries leave gaping wounds that do not suture well. Iran has seen it before: the 1979 revolution against a corrupt monarchy, backed by most Western powers, reversed the socio-cultural and geopolitical clock in Iran. With religious dogma fast overshadowing pragmatism, Iran continued to make enemies faster than the regime issued fatwas. Revolutions, as Crane Brinton warned, tend to replace one orthodoxy with another.
The regime will not back down, but this time the protestors won't either.
What distinguishes this moment from earlier spasms of dissent-the student uprisings of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, even the fuel-price protests of 2019-is depth. This is not a protest that can be appeased with cosmetic reforms or silenced through repression. It is, as Hannah Arendt might have described, a rupture in the realm of the "given," where obedience itself loses its self-evidence.
At the centre of this rupture stand Iranian women. They are not mere symbols, meme-worthy visuals, and scapegoats. They are willing for this revolution. The state has long invested disproportionate ideological energy in regulating women's bodies in a time-tested bid to control the social order itself. From mandatory veiling laws introduced shortly after 1979 to the morality police's quotidian humiliations, the Islamic Republic has denied women personhood for a long time now.
Scholars such as Asef Bayat have described this as "social control through everyday life," where power reproduces itself less through grand decrees than through constant minor coercions. What is now unfolding is the inversion of that logic: everyday resistance, diffuse yet relentless, eroding the regime's authority through a thousand cuts.
The defiant removal of the hijab, the cutting of hair, and the act of dancing in public are profoundly political acts in a system where the personal has been forcibly nationalised. Michel Foucault, writing admiringly yet controversially about the Iranian Revolution in 1978, noted that political spirituality could mobilise masses against a technocratic state. What he underestimated was how the same spiritual absolutism, once institutionalised, would hollow out political legitimacy. Today's protests mark the exhaustion of that absolutism.
The Iranian state still commands formidable instruments of violence. History offers no guarantee that moral clarity or numerical strength will prevail. The Paris Commune was drowned in blood; revolutions in various parts of Africa lodged local autocrats after ousting Europeans; the Arab Spring curdled into counterrevolution and civil war. Even the Iranian Revolution of 1979, often romanticised as a popular triumph, swiftly devoured its own pluralism. Intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, whose critiques of Westernisation informed the revolutionary imagination, would have scarcely recognised the clerical authoritarianism that followed.
And yet, something irreversible has occurred. Charles Tilly argued that revolutions are not events but processes-long negotiations between state capacity and popular contention. By that measure, Iran is already in a revolutionary situation, regardless of the outcome. The regime may survive institutionally, but it has lost something more difficult to recover: consent. Fear remains, but it is no longer monopolised by the state. When unveiled, teenage girls confront armed men with slogans rather than stones, the symbolic economy of power collapses.
Over sixty per cent of Iran's population was born after the revolution. Their historical memory is not of monarchy or imperial meddling, but of sanctions, censorship, and the grinding mismatch between official piety and lived reality.
What emerges, then, is not a movement with a manifesto but a society reclaiming authorship. There are no singular leaders, no charismatic figures to imprison or assassinate. This frustrates both the regime and foreign analysts accustomed to negotiating with faces rather than forces. But it is precisely this horizontality that lends the uprising its durability. As James C. Scott observed in his studies of everyday resistance, power is most vulnerable when defiance becomes normalised.
Whether the Islamic Republic falls next year or lingers for another decade is, in a sense, secondary. The moral universe it depends on has been punctured. Women of Iran, long relegated to the margins of official history, have moved from the corners to the centre. They have withdrawn compliance once and for all. In doing so, they have exposed a truth revolutions often reveal too late: that heroism is not what changes history. Persistence is.
