If I Were Khamenei

If I were Khamenei, I would sleep poorly these days. Not because of guilt – tyranny is rarely burdened by scruples – but because fear, once a visitor, quickly becomes an obsessive, clingy roommate: Fear of the moment when uniforms hesitate. When orders are delayed. When the machinery of repression develops a conscience. When the chant changes pitch and becomes irreversible.

If I were Khamenei, I would fear time. Not the abstract, philosophical kind, but the practical, treacherous version. The time that stains beards. Time that bends spines. Time that turns portraits into relics and slogans into exhausted clichés. I would hear its tick-tock not from a clock, but from inside my head: the sound of it no longer serving me. Each second a small defection. Each minute a reminder that even absolute power expires.

If I were Khamenei, I would fear laughter more than slogans. Slogans can be banned; laughter leaks. It seeps under doors. It infects guards. It corrodes the seriousness on which all autocrats depend. I would fear irony most of all, because irony is intelligence that has stopped asking permission.

If I were Khamenei, I would be deeply unsettled by the way my image circulates now. Not as an icon, but as a meme. Reduced. Distorted. Miniaturized. A face once meant to inspire awe now inspires parody. There is no recovering from that. Once power becomes funny, it is already bleeding out.

I would remember that no oppressor survives ridicule. Reverence embalms them; laughter dismembers them. Every joke is a small rehearsal for insubordination. Every sarcastic whisper is a crack in the wall.

And I would avoid mirrors. Mirrors are dangerous when you start realizing you’re a clown. When your face has ruled longer than your approval rating. They reveal what propaganda and insecure adjectives like “supreme” work so hard to conceal: age without dignity, durability without legitimacy, arrogance without confidence. A body sustained long after support has been unplugged.

If I were Khamenei, I would still pretend to be strong. I would still speak in the language of certainty. Dictators must. Denial is their final costume, their last attempt to pass authority off as destiny. But beneath it, I would know something has shifted. Something fundamental. The spell of inevitability has been broken.

I would cling obsessively to ritual. Ritual is the refuge of the hollow. I would repeat gestures, phrases, blessings, condemnations – anything that manufactures the illusion of continuity. Oppressors mistake repetition for permanence. They do not understand that repetition is often the sound of self-doubt echoing in an empty room.

I would speak endlessly of enemies. A declining despot needs enemies the way old kings needed jesters: constant reassurance that someone, somewhere, is still paying attention to them. I would insist that the problem is foreign interference. Foreign hands. Foreign plots. Foreign ideas smuggled in like contraband hope.

I would never admit that the most dangerous product inside Iran today is courage, and that it is locally produced. Homegrown. Organic. Passed from mother to daughter, from friend to friend, from wound to wound, from prison cell to prison cell. That my most dangerous enemies are not across borders; they are inside kitchens, classrooms, hair salons, taxis.… They are women untying their scarves with deliberate defiance, and men who no longer lower their voices in cafés.

If I were Khamenei, I would not understand women. Not because they are complex, but because they are inconvenient – they refuse to remain metaphors under control. I would spend my days legislating centimeters of hair, millimeters of skin, because it is always easier to repress bodies than to persuade minds. (I would forget, like my kind always does, that nothing exposes impotence like an obsession with flesh.)

And I would call that modesty. I would call it morality. I would call it piety. I would never name it for what it is: panic. Panic in the face of women who have understood that obedience is not a virtue, that silence is not holiness, that submission is not faith nor fate. Panic in the face of girls who dance in the streets while my sermons echo, increasingly hollow, against the walls of empty conviction.

(Indeed, if I were Khamenei, I would fear women the most, because they are the archive of memory. They remember who was beaten, who disappeared, who lied, who obeyed. They transmit this knowledge quietly, efficiently, from one generation to the next. A dictator can rewrite textbooks, but he cannot rewrite mothers. I would fear their courage precisely because it is not heroic in the cinematic sense. It is domestic, tenacious, unglamorous. It wears jeans and eyeliner, and it shows up every single fucking day.)

If I were Khamenei, I would insist that religion is under attack, when in fact it is being used as a shield for power’s nakedness. I would wrap myself in God the way mediocre men wrap themselves in titles. I would forget – conveniently – that faith imposed at gunpoint is not faith. It is hostage-taking.

I would call dissent blasphemy. I would need to. Calling it dissent would require acknowledging that people have a right to disagree. And rights are contagious. One right leads to another. First the right to speak. Then the right to choose. Then the right to live without asking permission from old men with trembling hands and despicable doctrines.

If I were Khamenei, I would sense that my words no longer land the way they once did. They echo briefly, then fall flat, like outdated slogans shouted into a future that has freed its ears. I would speak and watch faces remain unmoved. I would issue threats and notice how calmly they are received. I would know that my problem is no longer rebellion; it is detachment. People are not only angry. They have started moving on.

I would overcompensate. Of course I would. I would double down on severity, on executions, on moral sermons delivered by men who violate every commandment they pretend to defend except the ones they invented themselves. When control erodes, brutality rushes in to fill the void. Violence is the language of power that has lost its legitimacy.

(And yet – deep down, in the place where ideology cannot reach – I would know that violence is no longer working the way it once did. That it is producing hatred, not obedience. That every restriction shortens my lifespan instead of extending it. Totalitarians always learn this too late.)

If I were Khamenei, I would be haunted by ghosts. Not those of the dead – dictators feed on corpses – but those of the living. Former allies now quiet. Generals who hesitate for half a second too long. Bureaucrats who begin sentences with “perhaps.” The withdrawal of loyalty begins not with insurrection, but with vacillation.

And I would watch my inner circle carefully. Very carefully. Paranoia is the punishment of those who reject reality. I would wonder who is loyal, who is waiting, who is already planning their exit from my shadow. The most humiliating realization for an autocrat is that even his accomplices are tired of pretending.

If I were Khamenei, I would speak endlessly of martyrs. Martyrs are useful: They do not argue. They do not protest. They do not ask why their sisters are being beaten for showing their hair, while those they have died for are stealing entire futures in broad daylight. Martyrs are the perfect citizens of authoritarian regimes: silent, misappropriated, conveniently absent.

If I were Khamenei, I would dread succession. Not because I care about the future of the country (like all narcissists and megalomaniacs, I only care about myself). But because succession exposes the lie at the heart of all absolute power: that it was never eternal, only borrowed. The question “who comes next?” is the most subversive question of all for those who chase the illusion of eternity.

But I would pretend not to hear it. I would insist on continuity, on stability, on divine endorsement. God is especially useful when your argument has expired. But even the most ardent believers grow suspicious when God is summoned too often to justify batons and prisons.

If I were Khamenei, I would sense that history is rearranging me. Shrinking me. Filing me under “inevitable collapse.” History is cruel like that. It does not argue; it edits. One day you are a chapter. The next, a footnote. Then a cautionary tale parents tell children who think conformity equals safety.

And if I were Khamenei, I would know this final truth, the one no bully ever escapes: It’s not the bang that ends dominance, but irrelevance. Your reign ends with the moment when your voice still speaks, but nothing moves anymore. When your threats echo only among those paid to nod and tremble. When the crowd has already emotionally left the building.

(And if I were Khamenei, I would know, long before the statues fall, long before the borders shift, long before the history books are rewritten, that my end has already begun. And fear would be there, every night, lying beside me like an uninvited lover.)

But luckily, I am not Khamenei.

I am a woman watching women refuse erasure. I am a human being watching human beings say “enough.” I am a voice recognizing that the most radical NO is not loud, not armed, not spectacular – but determined. A woman standing bareheaded in the street, saying with her body what entire regimes fear to hear: You do not own me.

And that, more than anything, is why, if I were Khamenei, I would be terrified right now. Because nothing should terrify a religious tyrant more than a woman who is no longer afraid of him.