The conversation around Iran is rarely an honest one. It is curated, edited, and presented in fragments that serve a larger narrative. What is offered as moral clarity is, in reality, selective memory. The story begins where it is convenient and ends where it must.

To understand Iran today, one has to begin not with protest videos or sanction regimes, but with 1953. That year did not just mark a political event. It marked the dismantling of a democratic possibility. Iran, at the time, had a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who made the politically inconvenient decision of nationalising his country’s oil. This was not ideological adventurism, but a straightforward assertion of economic sovereignty. Oil, after all, lay beneath Iranian soil, not British. Yet, that assertion proved unacceptable to those who had grown accustomed to controlling both extraction and profit. What followed is no longer contested history. The United States and the United Kingdom, acting through their intelligence agencies (the CIA and MI6), orchestrated a coup that removed Mossadegh and restored the Shah with expanded authority. A democratic trajectory was cut short, not by internal collapse, but by external design. This is not the footnote, but the starting point. The theocratic Iran that emerged in 1979 did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged from years of accumulated discontent under the Shah’s increasingly autocratic rule, a model of rapid Westernisation that often appeared imposed rather than organic, and an economic order that deepened inequality even as it promised modernity. What ultimately coalesced into revolution was not a single ideological current but a convergence of forces, religious, secular, and student-led, united as much by opposition to the Shah as by resentment of American influence and the social disruptions of his reform agenda. Under Ayatollah Khomeini, that convergence found direction, and the monarchy had to give way. To discuss........

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