Mediated Legitimacy and the Recalibration of Religious Authority in Post-2022 Iran

This article develops the concept of mediated legitimacy to examine how Shiʿi religious authority becomes credible, fragile, or contestable under platformed conditions in post-2022 Iran. Rather than treating digital media simply as new channels for religious authority, mediated legitimacy directs attention to the conditions through which clerical symbols, utterances, and norms become recognizable and binding as they are compressed, detached from institutional settings, recoded, affectively amplified, and subjected to contested uptake. Methodologically, the article offers a close interpretive analysis of videos, captions, reposts, clerical statements, Persian-language media coverage, and social-media traces. It pairs two strategically selected, symbolically dense, and analytically contrasting cases: the airport clip in which an unveiled woman seizes a cleric’s turban and uses it as a scarf, and the clipping and circulation of Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi’s statements on compulsory hijab. The first reveals the recoding of clerical authority from below; the second shows its attempted recalibration from above. Together, the cases point to a transformation in the mediated conditions through which religious authority can appear coherent, credible, and binding in post-2022 Iran. The article offers mediated legitimacy as a portable analytic for examining religious authority beyond Iran.