God and Revolution in Iran

Abstract This article examines the power of God in postrevolutionary Iran through an exploration of divine ambiguity in relation to political experience. Over the past four decades, the Iranian political-theological landscape has gone through dramatic transformations in imagining God's interventions in the space of human history. For Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionary followers, the Islamic Republic began as a miracle and matured with divine assistance for the duration of the war with Iraq. In 2022, God returned as an uncertain ally for revolutionaries in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. In the intervening years, anxieties about divine punishment have jostled with heretical, humor-filled rage at God's injustice for the suffering of the Iranian people. This article explores these moments as windows onto political hope and despair, where the present, past, and future are imagined through a relationship, by turns devout and irreverent, with Islam's supreme being.