I was composing a longer post on the situation in Iran but I just wanted to quickly make a few points.
There is a growing tendency to claim that “Iranians are not Muslims.” That strikes me as analytically sloppy. Opposition to the clerical regime is not the same thing as abandonment of Islam. One can plausibly argue that most Iranians are not Khomeinists; it is far less plausible that they are not Muslims. A few online polls don’t tell us much. Those notoriously oversample people who are young, educated, urban, and tech-savvy. That does not describe anything like the majority of Iranians.
Second, I don’t think we really know what’s going on in Iran right now. If the violent protests are large enough, they’re probably visible from orbit. Western human intelligence in Iran has been degraded over the period of years and much of what we know is inference layered on social media noise.
Third and this didn’t occur to me until recently, one factor that may matter more than is being discussed is the effect of Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah on the Basij militia. The regime’s internal security apparatus does not exist in a vacuum; it draws legitimacy, manpower, and ideological energy from the same ecosystem that has been mobilized externally. Whether that has strengthened the Basij through mobilization or weakened it through distraction and attrition is an open question but it is unlikely to be neutral.
