Where Iranians dare to speak to each other without fear
Kambiz Hosseini
Host of nightly show The Program
In Iran today, the riskiest act is neither protest nor journalism. It's conversation.
Host of nightly show The Program
In Iran today, the riskiest act is neither protest nor journalism. It's conversation.
Around eleven o’clock on a winter Thursday night in Tehran, when smog hangs low and the city braces for yet another morning of inflation, something improbable happens.
People lift their phones and dial into a live call-in program that invites them to do what the state has discouraged for nearly 50 years, speak to one another without fear. In no other broadcast media do Iranians speak so freely.
Conversation, elsewhere, is a habit. In Iran, it is an act of retrieval. The Islamic Republic has regulated public expression so thoroughly that even a modest exchange, an honest memory, an unfiltered admission can feel subversive.
Authoritarian systems seldom fear noise, they fear permeability, the small openings through which private truth seeps back into collective life.
Conversation cannot, on its own, remake a country.
But it can remind people that they still constitute a public, and that a public, once it begins to speak, is difficult to extinguish.
On Thursday nights in Tehran, beneath a sky thick with pollutants and unspoken truths, that public can be heard, quietly but insistently, returning to life.
Each week I begin my program the same way: "What should Iran talk about tonight?" And the phone lines come alive.
Nostalgia
The first caller, a woman in Tehran named Artemis, speaks with the steadiness of someone who has carried a sentence around all day.
We know what we have lost, she begins, political rights, economic stability, clean air, the artists and scientists driven into exile. But we do not talk enough about what survived. Our culture, our sense of who we were.
She identifies as a monarchist, yet her critique is directed at her own camp. When monarchists scream and insult online, she says, they betray the very values they claim to defend, dignity, coexistence.
She pauses. Iran was once a place where different voices lived safely, she claims: we should try to be those voices again. It is a simple thought, but in a country where political language has been battered for decades, simplicity can sound radical.
Then the tone of the program shifts. A man named Ehsan calls from abroad with the urgency of someone carrying unresolved grief.
The time for talk is over, he declares. Forest fires, a collapsing currency, students expelled from school—none of it, he argues, will change until Iranians swear an oath to reclaim their homeland.
His language is harsh, almost martial, yet the emotion beneath it is unmistakably human: grief straining toward agency.
'I was wrong'
Then, a quieter voice enters the line, one woven deeply into Iran’s cultural memory.
Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh, the composer behind the defining soundtracks of pre-revolution Iranian cinema and several anthems that accompanied the uprising of 1979, speaks with a calm that cuts through the evening’s tension.
To many, he embodies the contradictions of that era, an artist who lent his talent to a revolution that promised liberation and delivered something narrower. What he does next is rare for his generation.
"I was wrong," he says. "I hope the generations after me can forgive us."
The confession does not land softly for everyone. A woman named Irandokht calls in, her voice tight with exhaustion. You left, she tells him. We stayed. And we live with what followed.
Her anger is not directed solely at him, it is aimed at the long silence surrounding his generation, decades in which few publicly reckoned with how a movement born in the language of justice hardened into repression.
Monfaredzadeh listens and responds without defensiveness. Under the Shah, he explains, Iranians had social and cultural freedoms, but not political ones.
Under the Islamic Republic, even those limited freedoms contracted. Until political freedom exists for everyone, he says, monarchists, republicans, leftists, Islamists, there can be no future worth building.
Other callers widen the frame. A woman from Karaj admits that during recent protests many workers stayed home out of fear of losing their salaries, leaving young demonstrators exposed.
Another describes an improvised referendum, the clanging of pots and pans from balconies, a city speaking through metal because speech itself had become unsafe.
I close the program the same way each week, Take good care of the person sitting next to you, I say, and sign off the national dialogue.
Then I sit for a moment longer and think to myself, we have a long way to go, yet the possibility of change feels close.
So close, no matter how far.
Tehran’s unveiling of a towering statue depicting the Roman Emperor Valerian kneeling before pre-Islamic Persian King Shapur I has renewed criticism of the Islamic Republic’s appeal to nationalist sentiment following the June war with Israel.
For over forty years, the theocracy purged ancient Persian history from schoolbooks, replacing it with post-Islamic narratives. But after the 12-day conflict with Israel, officials have turned to the distant pre-Islamic past to rally a divided society.
From murals of ancient kings and soldiers to patriotic songs added to Shi’ite mourning ceremonies performed before Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Tehran now embraces imagery once deemed heretical by its own revolutionary ethos.
'Kneel before Iran' campaign
Tehran’s Revolution (Enghelab) Square was the scene of an unusual spectacle on Friday as officials unveiled a massive bronze statue depicting Roman Emperor Valerian kneeling in submission before Sassanid King Shapur I, commemorating Iran’s victory at the Battle of Edessa (260 AD).
The event was held under the slogan “Kneel before Iran,” part of what authorities describe as a campaign to project “national unity and historical pride” following the June war with Israel.
Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani, a staunch ultraconservative, said on X: “Enmity with Great Iran can only end in kneeling before this historic nation.”
Municipal official Davood Goodarzi said the installation would be accompanied by visual displays depicting “other victories of Iranians over foreign aggressors,” including the defeat of British forces by local commander Rais-Ali Delvari, Mirza Kuchak Khan’s resistance against Russian troops, and Surena’s triumph over Rome at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE.
The goal, Goodarzi said, is “strengthening concepts such as national dignity, social unity, and Iranian identity.”
The statue, he said, would remain temporarily at Revolution Square before being moved to a city gateway “where it will stand as the first emblem of Iran before diplomats and foreign visitors.”
Unveiled women were allowed to attend the unveiling ceremony—an uncommon scene at events organized by Tehran’s ultra-hardline municipality.
The turn to the pre-Islamic past
The sharp reversal also recalls remarks once made by Khamenei. In a 2011 speech, he asserted that “all the great military victories of this nation came after Islam,” dismissing pre-Islamic accounts as “things that are not documented.”
In 1987, he had said that prophets triumphed over kings such as Cyrus and that “nothing remains of these monarchs in history but names remembered with derision.”
Nevertheless, pro-government social media accounts have now gone so far as to circulate posters equating Khamenei himself with Shapur, showing him standing with a staff as Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump kneel before him. The caption reads: “You will kneel before Iran.”
'Hypocrisy'
Pro-government figures have hailed the move as a patriotic success. Conservative political reporter Hossein Saremi posted: “Today’s grand Iranian gathering showed that people and the state share one essence: Iran itself. Nothing can take our homeland away.”
Others, however, called the spectacle “hypocrisy.” Journalist Gholamhossein Pashaei wrote on X: “Every year you close Pasargadae to stop people from celebrating Cyrus Day, yet you unveil Shapur’s statue in Enghelab Square with drums and fireworks during Fatimiyya (mourning period)!”
Dissident commentator Hamid Asafi called the ceremony “a perfect snapshot of the Islamic Republic’s contradictions.”
On Telegram he wrote: “A week ago they closed Cyrus’s tomb out of fear of the crowds, and now they glorify Shapur in the same breath. The Islamic Republic fears living history but poses for selfies with its corpse.”
He added: “They know people no longer respond to rosaries and sermons. That’s why they’ve brought history back to the stage—in a controlled costume. If they can’t erase the past, they’ll try to own it.”
The irony deepened as UNESCO formally recognized Cyrus’s Charter as one of the earliest human-rights documents.
President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X: “Iran, the cradle of dialogue, justice, and coexistence, can still inspire peace today.”
Users swiftly replied, questioning how such pride could coexist with a government that blocks access to Cyrus’s tomb each year to those wishing to visit it on his birthday.