THE world awaits the next steps in the war between Iran and Israel, after unprovoked Israel-US attacks, the first hits on Iran since 1980. An understanding of Iran’s religious and political history helps to shed light on how Iran might respond as events unfold.
The myth of the Battle of Karbala shapes Iran’s entire political culture. During the events leading up to the 1979 revolution, Imam Hussain’s heroic martyrdom against Yazid, in 680 CE, gave Iran’s young revolutionaries the zeal to face death in their successful attempt to oust what they saw as a US client-king that was out to destroy Islam through gharbzadegi, the “Westoxification” of Iranian society.
These revolutionaries, formed in revolution and war, are now the elders who rule the country. Karbala remains alive. During Ashura, the annual day marking the battle, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, weeps publicly over the memory of Hussain’s doomed last stand for justice.
IN SHIA Islam, martyrdom is a divine event, literally a shahid or “witnessing” of God, in the pursuit of destroying tyranny. The struggles of the Shia — Iran against a US-backed Saddam Hussain (1980-1988); Hezbollah against 50 years of Israeli invasion, occupation, and bombings (1983 onwards); Iraqis against the US occupiers (2003-2011); “the Houthis” against the Saudi Royal Airforce (2015-2022) and the US Air Force (March-May 2025) — were all animated by the sacrifice of Hussain. In these wars, the Shia saw themselves as fighting the forces of an American Yazid. Karbala as a driver of Shia history should be kept in mind as events unfold in the Middle East.
The extent of these strikes and Iran’s retaliation against Israeli cities and a US base in Qatar remain obscured by the propaganda of all involved. What can be said is that Iran and Israel see one another as deep existential threats to vanquish, and have been, at the time of writing, escalating strikes respectively with supersonic ballistic missiles and F35 across 1000 miles of sky.
As for the US, Iran is monitoring the situation after their recent round of kabuki spectacle: telegraphed strikes against what are most likely empty buildings, cleared out of equipment and personnel. In their war with the regional and global superpower, Iranian nationalists, both secular and religious, maintain a posture borrowed from the lips of Hussain: “Death with dignity is better than a life of humiliation.”
This characterisation of Shia politics, though true, has also become something of a caricature through its repetition as Shia propaganda. Yet the US and Israel use the same narrative to cast Shia actors in the region as resentful death cults. Political Shiism, however, is considerably more nuanced and varied than the caricature would have it. Avoiding humiliation need not be an all-or-nothing affair, at least in the short term.
THE tactics that Iran uses to strike and counter-strike are debated within two poles in Iranian political theology, in turn derived from interpretations of the righteousness in the acts of the imams. These poles map onto the difference between imams favoured by Iran’s “twelver” Shias and their Yemeni “fiver” Shia allies.
Iran believes in 12 imams, whose line ended in the ninth century with al-Mahdi, who went into “occultation” — or became invisible — and who will return at the end of time. Khomeini established the Islamic Republic on theological grounds; it would try to guard Islam against “Westoxification” (secularisation, globalisation, and Western values) until the return of al-Mahdi.
Yemen’s “fiver” Shias agree with Iran’s only up to the fourth imam, al-Sajjad, Hussain’s only son to survive Karbala, and who assumed a quietist position in order to survive. But al-Sajjad had two very different sons: al-Baqir, whose line to the 12th is followed by the Iranians, and his much younger son Zayd, who ends the line of imams for Yemen’s Zaydi Shia and their namesake.
Zayd was planning a shock attack in Kufa against the Umayyad dynasty who had killed his grandfather Hussain, but he was cautioned by Baqir to be patient and wait until he had a more opportune moment to strike. Ignoring his older brother’s warnings, Zayd went into battle, was killed and crucified by the Umayyad caliph, his body left on his cross for three years.
In 2014, a senior delegation of the Houthi movement arrived in Tehran. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Ansar Allah, known in the West as “the Houthis”, was in town to meet Ali Khamenei and ask for Iranian support for an audacious plan to march on Sanna, the capital, and to take over the country. The response was an uncanny parallel to the conversation between the Baqir and Zayd in 740CE; Khamenai advised against a coup, but Abdul-Malik al-Houthi did it anyway.
Ansar Allah, with its relatively primitive arsenal of Iranian-supplied arms, is perhaps the most provocative and fearless Shia militant group of modern history. It has waded through blood, much of it its own, for more than 30 years, and has waged a war using missiles and drones against Israel in support of the Gazans, and even on the US military after coming to terms with the latter in May.
Iran is unlikely to engage in such reckless action unless pushed to extremes. For 30 years Khamenei has instituted a military doctrine of entezar, or waiting. Iran, against such technologically powerful enemies, does not attack, but it carefully calibrates its counterattacks to establish deterrence. For example, when Iran’s major general Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in 2020, against established military protocol between the US and Iran, Iran sent a warning to the Americans, and, for the first time in its history, directly hit US military bases. More than 100 US soldiers hiding in bunkers sustained severe brain injuries.
IRAN itself is now divided between those who advocate maintaining the policy of strategic patience and those who say that Israel’s transgressing of long-standing military convention in Gaza (genocide), Syria (invasion), Lebanon (the decapitation of Hezbollah), and now Iran (air strikes on civilian infrastructure and military assassinations) has eroded Iran as a regional power, and could, if not stopped, seriously threaten nazam, the Iranian word for political order of the country established in the 1979.
Blake Archer Williams, an Iranian-American scholar of Shia Islam, who is based in Iran and knows the system well, says that there is division within Iran between a deliberative and patient faction, led by Khamenei, and constituencies within that system referred to as “Zaydis”. The Iranian Zaydis argue for a more spontaneous and aggressive strategy against both Israel and the United States. The thinking is that both Iran and the US want to avoid a war with a nuclear deal, and that the ongoing war is designed to erode Iranian leverage over such a deal.
“The Iranian nation firmly stands against imposed war — just as it always has — and it also firmly stands against imposed peace,” Khamenei said last week in a televised speech. Iran knows that it must tread a path between those who think that avoiding an imposed peace means maintaining a steady attritional tempo of strikes against Israel, and those who believe in escalation — for example, by disrupting regional oil production and distribution, targeting US soldiers, or breaking out for a nuclear bomb. “The question of whether strategic patience, and Ali Khamenei’s approach in particular, or the ‘Zaydi’ approach will prevail, I would say remains an open question,” Mr Archer Williams says.
Arron Reza Merat is a journalist covering Iranian affairs.