The air ripples with the rhythm of hand drums as wrestlers dance and twirl around the battleground to songs of Persian poetry and religious incantation. They engage in flyting, a form of trash talk through poetry. Then they grapple each other and wait for an opening, trying to wear down the rival until a definitive blow slams one to the ground. This spectacle occurs at hundreds of modern and traditional wrestling clubs, or zorkhanehs, in Iran.
For the past four decades, many have viewed the Islamic Republic through the Cold War lens, struggling with the question of containing Tehran’s threat. As a result, historical analysis—from waiting for an Iranian Mikhail Gorbachev to prescribing political jujitsu—has been applied to the problem. But if one looks closely, the ancient Persian sport of wrestling might have answers to understanding how to contain Iran.
Waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev
To many, the only perceivable model for change within authoritarian regimes has been to draw from the history books and take inspiration from dealing with the Soviet Union. As a result, since the mid-1990s Western analysts and commentators have been “waiting for Ayatollah Gorbachev” to shake up Tehran and deliver “liberalizing reforms.” In 1997, a Washington Post piece described newly elected President Mohammad Khatami as “Iran’s Gorbachev.” After Hassan Rouhani won the presidential race in 2013, a New York Times piece wondered whether he would be the “Iranian Gorbachev” and soon proclaimed that Iran was having a “Gorbachev moment,” with high hopes for nuclear talks and normalization. A commentator went even further in 2014 and predicted that benefiting from the supreme leader’s “tacit support,” Rouhani might even outperform Gorbachev and strike a “delicate balance [between] continuity and change” within the regime.
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Such comparisons resurfaced this year after the snap election to replace the “Butcher of Tehran,” President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. Ahead of the election, pundits argued that the race had provided Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a “golden opportunity to reverse course . . . and make a U-turn.” Later, “reformist” Masoud Pezeshkian, who won the race, was marketed as a “liberalizer” who could “forge a more moderate Islamist regime.” A reformist daily in Iran even published a front-page photo and article about Pezeshkian with the piece titled “Manifesto of the Iranian Gorbachev.” All these predictions, however, miss multiple key points.
First, all factions within the Islamic Republic abhor the Soviet model of evolution. From the kingmakers who helped Pezeshkian win to hardliners, all have reacted to such comparisons with outrage. The clerical establishments saw the Gorbachev model as a recipe for disaster because it neither delivered sustainable wealth nor prevented regime collapse.
More importantly, these analysts fail to see that, under the Islamic Republic, the office of the presidency—the source of the expected “Ayatollah Gorbachev”—amounts to nothing but being the supreme leader’s “footman,” in the words of two-term former President Khatami. True power resides in the hands of Khamenei, and he has repeatedly demonstrated that he is no Gorbachev. The supreme leader is well aware of the Soviet-inspired strategy and has warned dozens of times about the folly of being “fooled to trust the West and the US.” In a 2000 speech, he proclaimed, “Islam is not communism. The Islamic Republic is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Iran is not a motley of countries sown together.” He then took a jab at Gorbachev and said he was “fool[ish]” enough to “trust the West and the US,” leading to a slippery slope that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
How an ayatollah wrestles
Jujitsu, the Soviet-era security jargon, is evoked repeatedly in attempts to rein in the Islamic Republic, especially since Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile attack against Israel—its second direct attack on the Jewish state this year.
The concept of jujitsu in geopolitics revolves around a simplified and cartoonish understanding of the martial art. Instead of meeting the opponent with force, one manipulates their kinetic energy against them to send them flying across the dojo.
To entertain the idea of unarmed combat symbolizing the struggle to contain Tehran’s threat, a better option would be wrestling, as pictured in the national epic of the Iranian people, the Shahnameh or Book of Kings. To underscore wrestling’s importance, note that, once in a blue moon, a taste of the ancient sport can be experienced at Khamenei’s compound in Tehran. Khamenei believes the sport “encapsulates heroism . . . dates back thousands of years in our culture . . . and must be celebrated, persevered.” Wrestling in this manner has three major stages.
Rajaz (“boasting”): Walking around the battleground, cursing the adversary, listing your prowess and their weaknesses, boasting about your wins of the past and the glory yet to come.
Galaviz (“grappling”): Closing the gap and locking horns with the adversary. Contact is made here, not to land a blow or in an attempt to push the rival out of the ring. The point is to establish a tenuous and strenuous equilibrium to wear down the enemy while waiting for an opening.
Khak (“ground”): More specifically, slamming the adversary to the ground in a swift motion. There is a split second between the last two steps when, due to fatigue or distraction, a weakness of the adversary is exposed. That’s when the final blow lands.
Applying wrestling to today’s events
Khamenei has faced setbacks in the propaganda war (the rajaz stage), but his media machine has somewhat recovered from these blows. For instance, Tehran was once seen as a safe haven by terrorist leaders like Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh and al-Qaeda’s Saif al-Adel, who found Iran to be one of the few places for them to travel, reside, and operate. That image was shattered after the targeted July killing of Hamas top leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. However, the clerical establishment recovered some lost propaganda ground when Khamenei appeared in public days after Iran’s missile attack on Israel, leading Friday prayers for the first time in almost five years and projecting an image of power and confidence. The smoke-and-mirror tactics of the clerical establishment have not remained confined to Iran’s borders or the Middle East. Ignoring the Islamic Republic’s imperialist aspirations and its repression of its people, gullible Westerners have fallen for the old lie that the regime is the “defender of the downtrodden of the world” and wave the flags of the Islamic Republic and its proxies as if they are freedom fighters.
Regarding the second stage, galaviz, Tehran has had the upper hand and has won round after round. Grueling proxy wars and wearing down the enemy have been the cornerstones of Tehran’s campaigns in the Middle East. With no regard for human life since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic has unleashed wave after wave of terror upon the world and has shied away from no war crime to grasp control over Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. While Western governments face public censure for their “interventionism” and seek to end the “unending wars,” for the Islamic Republic jihad is eternal and shall only end with the “end of time.” Although the Islamic Republic faces economic collapse, its leaders believe it has the eternity to wear down the enemy.
The world has already seen Tehran’s third move in this deadly game. It has many times exported death and destruction in the region, from terror attacks sponsored and orchestrated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and carried out by its proxies to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings by Hezbollah to the October 7, 2023, terror attack by Hamas. As promised, khak is swift and deadly.
Rajaz, galaviz, and khak are stages of a bloody cycle, but there is no need for one cycle to end before another is initiated elsewhere. Time is on the side of the Islamic Republic. Until the regime is dismantled in its entirety, the Islamic Republic will strike again “from where you do not expect” because, as he said himself, “if the road to battle is blocked, we will grow wings and fly to war.”
It is high time for the world to ditch the Cold War-era lens, comprehend the ayatollah’s wrestling tactics, and contain the Islamic Republic before more innocent lives are crushed amid his deadly dance.
Khosro Sayeh Isfahani is an advocate, journalist, and Internet researcher with years of experience working in Iran, including work related to the LGBTQI community.