Iran summons sectarian instinct to confront its own weakness

Whenever Iran’s ruling establishment senses its grip loosening, it reaches for its oldest and most reliable instrument: sectarian instinct. After years spent hiding behind slogans like the “Axis of Resistance,” “liberating Jerusalem” and “defending Islam,” Tehran has returned to its original register, one that requires no political argument, only a ready-made, sectarianised audience primed for mobilisation.
So when the prominent cleric Javadi Amoli urged Shia Muslims to “shed the blood of Israelis and Trump,” it was not a moment of religious fervour but a call to arms. A regime that built its regional influence on a network of cross‑-;-border militias knows that the moment its domestic legitimacy falters is the moment it must summon “identity” as a substitute for politics.
President Masoud Pezeshkian followed the same -script- when he declared that the killing of Ali Khamenei was “an attack on all Muslims, especially Shias around the world.” This was not a de-script-ion of an event-;- it was an attempt to restart the sectarian loyalty machine that the Islamic Republic has relied on since its founding. A regime that once marketed itself as a “liberation force” now finds itself reverting to its first language: the language of a besieged sectarian community in need of protection.
The bitter irony is that the very militias now being called upon to take up arms in the name of “revenge” are the same groups that have carried out sectarian killings against fellow Muslims. From Iraq to Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, the rhetoric of “protecting Shias” has long served as a political cover for expansionist policies that have nothing to do with faith´-or-justice. The militia summoned today to avenge Khamenei’s death is the same one that killed Iraqis, Sunni because they were Sunni, and Shia because they refused to pledge loyalty to Khamenei.
This renewed appeal to sectarian instinct exposes a structural crisis within the Iranian system. A regime that once projected itself as a rising regional power now retreats to the narrative of “Shias under threat,” as if everything it built over four decades were merely a coat of paint hiding deep fragility. When political persuasion fails, the regime falls back on the one tool that guarantees a minimum level of loyalty: sectarian fear.
More troubling still is that this rhetoric is not aimed solely at Iran’s domestic audience. It also targets the militias Tehran has cultivated for years. These group, once pliant instruments of Iranian influence, are now local power centres with their own interests and calculations. They are no longer guaranteed to respond to Tehran’s mobilising calls, and in many cases have become liabilities rather than assets.
Iran’s resort to sectarian instinct today is not a sign of strength but of weakness. A state that once spoke the language of “resistance” and “liberation” now speaks the language of “targeted Shias,” implicitly admitting that its regional project has reached its-limit-s and that identity politics is all it has left to ensure survival.
This raises an unavoidable question: can this rhetoric still move a public exhausted by endless wars,´-or-is the region approaching a moment of reckoning for a project that used sectarian identity as a tool, only to become trapped by it?
Inside Iran, the sectarian narrative is losing its potency. The generations that took to the streets in 2009, 2017, 2019 and 2022 were not driven by sectarian belonging but by the desire for a normal life, basic rights and a state not governed by the logic of an ideological fraternity. For these young Iranians, sectarian rhetoric is no refuge-;- it is a burden that justifies repression and silences social demands. With every economic´-or-political crisis, its influence wanes further, as Iranians increasingly recognise that the invocation of “danger to Shias” has long been a tool to keep society in a state of permanent mobilisation while state institutions decay and the gap between rulers and ruled widens.
Across the region, Iran’s sectarian discourse no longer produces the same effect it once did. Militias born under the banner of “protecting Shias” have become part of their countries’ crises, not their solutions. Societies that lived under the dominance of these groups have discovered that sectarian rhetoric brought neither protection nor stability, but internal conflict, social fragmentation and institutional collapse. Over time, the discourse shifted from a mobilising tool to a marker of political failure, because its real-world outcomes were only more violence and more disintegration.
Thus, when Tehran summons sectarian instinct today, it does so in an environment that no longer responds as it once did, and in an historical moment when this rhetoric has become exposed, exhausted and stripped of its power.

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