The war by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran is typically framed in strategic terms: deterrence, escalation, military pressure, missile capability, nuclear risk. While these elements are significant, they fail to capture the full narrative. To comprehend how Iran might fight and endure this conflict, one must look beyond military calculations and into the moral universe through which the Islamic Republic interprets power, loss, and, above all, resilience. This is not merely a state under assault, but one whose ideological core has long been shaped by a Shia political theology of martyrdom, sacrifice, and sacred resistance. This matters because wars are waged not only with weapons but with narratives and values; meaning itself can become a potent political resource.

Since the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes during Ramadan, hardliners have organized state-backed mourning ceremonies night after night, even as bombing campaigns persist. Among the Islamic Republic's loyalists, particularly within the paramilitary Basij force, are individuals prepared to die as martyrs for what they perceive as rule by divinely-guided clerics. This does not imply the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. Rather, it suggests something more complex and troubling: external violence may not weaken it in the manner its enemies anticipate. Instead, it could reactivate the symbolic and moral grammar that has sustained the Islamic Republic for decades while legitimizing repression domestically and abroad.

The Islamic Republic was never just a bureaucratic state. From its inception, it presented itself as a moral project, fusing sovereignty with sacred history. The central emotional and symbolic reservoir of this history lies in Shia memory, especially the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, where an Umayyad army massacred Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein and his small band of followers. In Shia tradition, this historical event has come to symbolize unjust power, innocent suffering, righteous resistance, and redemptive sacrifice. It reminds believers that oppression does not necessarily equate to defeat, suffering can signify standing on the side of truth, and death can become a form of witness.

This is why martyrdom is not a peripheral theme in the Islamic Republic's self-conception but one of its central organizing values. For years, the ruling order has derived legitimacy by portraying itself as the righteous victim and guardian of a sacred struggle against "Estekbar" (imperialism), domination, humiliation, and foreign aggression. A political-theological order partly built on the sanctification of sacrifice can absorb attacks into its own moral universe. What appears externally as devastation can be narrated internally as testimony, endurance, and faithfulness, with death itself becoming politically productive.

This is not mere speculation. Iran's strategy in the current war increasingly revolves around endurance and attrition: outlasting its adversaries, surviving the blows, disrupting energy flows, and betting that political resolve in Washington and allied capitals will fracture before Iran's own does. Reports indicate that, despite heavy losses, there have been no visible signs of internal collapse under bombardment. The memory of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war also endowed the Islamic Republic with a durable culture of endurance and sacrifice, alongside experience in surviving prolonged external pressure, though the human cost to Iranians was immense.

Of course, not all solidarity is theological. Many Iranians who despise the Islamic Republic may still recoil from foreign attack, not out of loyalty to the republic but due to nationalism, fear, grief, or horror at collective punishment. Yet this is precisely the point. External violence can blur moral lines within the country. It can narrow public space, intensify a siege mentality, and allow the state to once again present itself as the defender of the nation rather than the author of repression. The Islamic Republic has often benefited when domestic anger is displaced by an external threat.

This does not mean the Islamic Republic's theology is universally persuasive. Reports suggest Iran's next leadership faces a fraying loyalist base and serious long-term questions about legitimacy. Many Iranians have long ceased to believe in the state's sacred narrative. However, political theology does not require universal belief to function. It needs enough believers, institutions, rituals, fear, and war to transform suffering into cohesion.

That is what makes the present war morally and politically perilous. If the US and Israel imagine that overwhelming force will simply strip the Islamic Republic of meaning, they may be profoundly misunderstanding the nature of the political-theological order they are confronting. The rhetoric of US President Donald Trump has not helped. His demand for Iran's "unconditional surrender," which pushes the war away from limited strategic ends toward humiliation and absolute defeat, does more than escalate; it provides the Islamic Republic with exactly the kind of external enemy it knows how to narrate.

In a secular strategic imagination, violence weakens by destroying capacity. In a political-theological imagination, violence can strengthen by confirming sacred purpose. An ideological state that views itself through the lens of sacred resistance may lose commanders, infrastructure, and territory, yet still gain something symbolically vital: renewed access to the language of martyrdom. This is one of the tragedies of war against ideological states. The more one attacks them from the outside, the easier it can become for them to recover the myths that sustain them from within. None of this denies the brutality of the Islamic Republic or romanticizes its theology of sacrifice.

Source: www.aljazeera.com