Iranians have adopted a new sport in the past few years: knocking the turban from a passing cleric’s head. There are points for technique and for how high and how far you can get their headgear to go. These are small acts of revenge against a hated religious elite who came to power on a wave of arrests and torture and who, as recently as January, ordered thousands of peaceful protesters to be shot in the streets. It’s also a symptom of something larger. Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.

“The strange death of political Islam” is an idea that’s in the air at the moment. Rule by clerics, and by others who claim to speak in the name of God, is going out of fashion in the Islamic world. The New York Times carried an essay on this in June by its expert Middle East correspondent, Ben Hubbard. After the Arab Spring, he writes, there were many attempts to govern strictly according to Islamic principles. They failed. And so “political Islam in the region has withered.”

Every country is different and Iran has special circumstances: the Shia clerics’ grip on power was pried loose in the turmoil caused by US and Israeli bombing. The beneficiaries have not been the democracy protesters, but the ultra-hardliners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So one of the few achievements of Donald Trump’s ill-considered war has been to shift power within the regime to those with even more uncompromising attitudes toward the Great Satan. A huge new mural in Tehran shows Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) sinking beneath a roiling tide of blood. “You will drown in the sea of the Iranian nation’s revenge,” the slogan says, in English as well as Persian.

Islamism is over in the same way that communism was over after the end of the Cold War

Islamism is over in the same way that communism was over after the end of the Cold War

Still, the end of clerical primacy is having real effects. Iran is, very slightly, less Islamist than before. State television coverage of government rallies shows women without headscarves – and even broadcasts interviews with them. That is astonishing given that the last cycle of anti-government protests began after a woman was beaten to death in a police station, having been arrested for not wearing her hijab in the “proper” manner. On Instagram, the “Rich Kids of Tehran” account posts defiantly........

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