Iran Colloquium: Satan Conquered: The Iranian Revolution and its Demons

The 1979 Revolution gave birth to a political order that defined God as its greatest protector and Satan as its ultimate foe. While scholars have long grappled with the Islamic Republic’s theological master narratives, Satan’s multifaceted role in the Iranian political and religious landscape remains poorly understood. In this talk, I offer an analysis of a range of sources— textual, ethnographic, and audiovisual—to argue that in the past two decades, confrontations with the Accursed One have fragmented into contradictory, anxiety-ridden struggles for the soul of the Islamic Republic.