No Song Can Save the Regime: The Hollow Theater of Khomeinist National Pride and Patriotism

Khamenei's favorite maddāh, Mahmoud Karimi—known as Hajj Mahmoud

In a calculated but ultimately hollow pivot, Iran’s state-approved maddāhān—clerical singers long known for their mournful eulogies or tearjerker panegyrics about the suffering of Shi’a saints—have begun performing nationalist songs such as “Ey Iran,” a patriotic anthem that had been suppressed for decades under the Islamic Republic. This shift is not a sign of ideological change but a tactical move by a regime scrambling to reassert its legitimacy amid mounting internal and external pressures.

For over four decades, the Islamic Republic has treated nationalism as a threat. The regime has actively repressed any cultural, historical, or symbolic expression of pre-revolutionary Iranian identity, favoring instead a rigid, transnational Shi’a theocratic ideology. Songs like “Ey Iran” were seen as relics of a secular, cosmopolitan past—an era the regime sought to erase. Those who sang such songs in public risked harassment, censorship, or worse.

Now, in the wake of Israel’s recent military strikes and growing domestic unrest, the regime is trying to signal unity and national resilience by recycling the very cultural elements it once tried to destroy. The same clerics who condemned nationalist pride are now staging performances meant to evoke patriotism. But the Iranian people see through the charade. These orchestrated displays are not acts of repentance; they are damage control.

Khamenei's favorite maddāh, Mahmoud Karimi—known as Hajj Mahmoud—has been appearing at the typical Shia self-flagellation parties—or Seeneh Zani (chest beating)—to sing patriotic anthems for Iran, albeit with the Shia references.

Top, left to right: Abdol-Reza Halali, Hajj Mansour Arzi, Seyyed Majid Bani-Fatemi. Middle, left to right: Hajj Mahmoud Karimi, Saied Haddadian, Djavad Moghaddam. Bottom, left to right: Maysam Motie'ie, The Taheri Brothers

For decades, these Shia lamentation singers have served as the cultural shock troops of clerical rule, specializing in choreographed weeping over Karbala’s martyrs. They glorified victimhood and obedience, anesthetizing the masses with mournful chants about past injustice while ignoring present tyranny. Now, in a baffling twist of political theater, many Maddāhān have begun singing “Ey Iran,” a beloved nationalist anthem long banned as heretical and anti-Islamic.

This pivot from dirges to flag-waving is not a sign of national awakening. It is crisis choreography. These regime-linked performers—once heralds of Ashura’s death cult—now don the garb of patriotism, desperately trying to patch together an emotional unity the regime itself has shredded.

In September 1980, when Saddam invaded Iran and Khomeini found himself in need of the Air Force pilots he had imprisoned, the pilots agreed to fly in defence of Iran if Khomeini would have the Soroud e Shahanshahi broadcast on IRIB that very evening as they left prison and took off to battle the Iraqis.

The cynical Khomeiniists always ressort to Iranian nationalism and patriotism, which they despise, when they feel cornered. It's a last-ditch effort to hijack nationalism in service of a theocracy that has spent four decades attacking its very soul.

The grievances of the Iranian people are too numerous and too deeply rooted to be masked by state-sponsored performances. Iranians have endured economic mismanagement, political repression, endemic corruption, and moral hypocrisy on a scale few regimes have matched. The clerical elite and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have plundered the country’s wealth, crushed its civil society, and turned one of the oldest civilizations in the world into a global pariah.

The regime has squandered the nation’s resources on foreign militias and proxy wars, while millions of Iranians struggle with inflation, joblessness, and unaffordable housing. It has executed political prisoners, tortured dissidents, and imprisoned women and girls for the crime of choosing what to wear. It has criminalized joy, suffocated culture, and transformed universities into surveillance zones. It has waged war against artists, students, teachers, laborers, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and anyone else who dared to exist outside its narrow ideological confines.

These are not the grievances of the past. They are the lived experience of Iranians today.

The regime’s sudden embrace of nationalist iconography—whether through maddāhān performances, symbolic gestures, or appeals to cultural pride—cannot erase decades of violence and betrayal. Nor can it reverse the regime’s ongoing crackdown on basic rights, its sponsorship of international terrorism, or its alienation of Iran from the global community.

What we are witnessing is not transformation—it is theater. The same machinery that silences dissent is now staging patriotism, hoping that a borrowed anthem can substitute for legitimacy. It cannot. The trust is broken. The wounds are deep. The record is clear.

No performance, no song, no symbolic act can reconcile the people of Iran with a regime that has spent nearly half a century dismantling their future.