Why War with Iran Will Have no Result?
Abstract:
The war with Iran did not begin with missiles. It began in 1924 when the Ottoman Caliphate collapsed and nobody answered the question it left behind. A century of managing that question through institutions, proxies and bombs has made it unanswerable. This is the consequence of that failure.
The Thought Can Not Be Killed.
Humans are the psychosomatic animals. They may act without rational but never without a thought. The right way to control humans is to control the thought. Governments know it and work on it all the time. The education curriculum, the censorship, or certification for suitable film media etc. are the examples of thought control.
The 100 Year Mismanagement
Missiles are hitting Tehran. But the fuse was lit in 1924. This war is not about nuclear weapons. It is not about regime change. It is not even about Iran. It is about an unanswered question that has been killing people for centuries:
Who holds legitimate authority over the political life of Muslims?
Every bomb falling on Tehran today is a downstream consequence of that question being mismanaged, manipulated, and deliberately left unresolved by Western powers across three generations. To understand the Iran war we must go back to the time before Iran. We must go back to the bottle which held the djinn and the moment it broke.
The Bottle that Let out Djinn
For six centuries the Ottoman Caliphate was the containing institution. Whatever its failures, whatever its corruption, it provided a singular answer to the question of political authority over Sunni Muslim life globally. The Caliph in Istanbul was the symbolic successor to the Prophet’s political authority. The question was answered. The bottle held.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate in 1924. That single act was theologically unprecedented in 1300 years of Islamic political history. Ataturk did not merely dissolve a government. He decapitated the institution that had been answering the authority question since the 7th century.
What replaced it in Turkey was aggressive secular nationalism. Arabic script replaced with Latin. Religious courts abolished. Islamic law replaced wholesale with imported Swiss civil code. The fez banned. Sufi orders criminalized. Religion was pushed entirely into private life.
This produced a question that nobody had prepared an answer for. Without a Caliph, who speaks for Islam politically? Three broad answers competed across the 20th century. Secular nationalism on the Turkish model said religion is private and the nation-state is sovereign. Arab nationalism tried to build identity on ethnicity rather than faith. Political Islam said the correct response to the Caliphate’s destruction is to rebuild Islamic governance from the ground up.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. Four years after the Caliphate’s abolition. That timing is not coincidental. The djinn did not escape on its own. It was released by people who thought they could manage what came out.
British Management
Islam, before it was accepted as a religion by British was known as Mohammedanism. The word ‘ism” is used in English for something to have features of but which has no identity of its own. The legal name of Muslim law in India, even today is Mahomedan Law. When British reached that understanding with Muslims of India and Gulf, It was called Islam.
The British needed administratively governable Islam after the 1857 revolt in India. They did not oppose the institutionalization of Islam outside Ottoman fold. The presumed that small and divided factions will enable it to control these factions.
What followed across the next century was a systematic sequence of interventions, each designed to produce a manageable Islam, each producing an unmanageable monster that eventually turned on its creator.
Unorganized folk Islam with Sufi shrines and saint veneration was difficult to classify, tax, and control but that too was institutionalised by Bareilvi sect. The Deoband seminary with modified Saudi Wahhabi theology was founded in 1867, shortly after the revolt. It channeled Muslim energy into textual scholarship and away from political resistance. The British found that useful. Wali Khan documents how the Moulvis were on payroll of British Governor as per the diaries of Governor himself.
However, the Deobandi opposed Partition of India as it hampered their mission to convert entire Hindustan into an Islamic Republic. This autonomous response did not wake up the British and they continue the same belief of management even today in England. The scandal called Grooming Gang in England and inaction of state machinery is a manifestation of the same problem. Any stern action will reveal institutional support to the accused persons. Hence a new enquiry is ordered every few years.
In the decades after Partition of India, the Deoband traveled efficiently across the subcontinent and eventually into Afghanistan with consequences that produced Taliban Government in 1996 which led to September 2001. Osama Bin Laden and 9/11 are matters of history now but are linked to same mismanagement.
Similar other institutions were brought up in British India to control the Muslims. Those who did not support British were not recognised. Ahl-e- hadis was derecognised earlier with its, founder excommunicated from the Court of Bhopal. But in 19th century it became acceptable. The Aligharh Muslim College became a breeding gound of partition of India with active debates on Muslim homeland.
France hosted Ayatollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Chateau for years before 1979, calculating he was a manageable alternative to an unreliable Shah. Paris provided the runway for an ideology it did not understand and could not control. Khomeini flew back to Tehran on February 1, 1979. France has been managing the consequences ever since.
America armed and funded the Afghan Mujahideen through the 1980s to bleed the Soviets. The CIA called it their finest operation. The graduates of that operation founded Al-Qaeda. The logic was identical each time. Grab the institutional lever, point it at the current enemy, ignore what comes out the other end.
Iran
Iran escaped the entire process as outside Sunni World. It was evolving to become a modern state. Shia Islam lacked a formal pope-like figure and features multiple Grand Ayatollahs (marja’ al-taqlid) as sources of emulation. The preeminent Grand Ayatollah before the revolution was Hossein Borujerdi (1875–1961), the leading marja’ recognized across Iran until his death; after him, figures like Ayatollah Shariatmadari gained prominence but held no unified “Grand Imam” role under the Pahlavi monarchy.
Westernization in Tehran was rapid even though the rural Iran remained orthodox. Hiajb was there but in rural remote areas. Life was simple and religion was a personal matter with little or nothing to do with State.
Khomeini outlined Velayat-e Faqih (“Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist”) in his 1970 book Islamic Government, arguing that in the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, a qualified jurist (faqih) must hold absolute political and religious authority to enforce sharia. This doctrine rejected secular monarchy and positioned the faqih as the ultimate guardian over state affairs, legislature, military, and society.
Velayat-e Faqih established Ayatollah Khomeini as a pope-like authority in 1979. Iran adopted new Constitution in 1979 through referendum, after the Monarchy was displaced in 1979. Khomeini arrived from France to supervise the process of new Government. Article 107 of the Constitution named Khomeini as the first Supreme Leader, granting him veto power, command of armed forces, and oversight of all branches. This was entirely different from traditional Shia marja’ roles. This transformed Supreme Leader from a revolutionary cleric into a centralized, infallible ruler akin to a theocratic pope.
Meanwhile, the USA has created a new ‘Iran’ of Pakistan with its Asim Munir as its new Ayatollah. More about it in the next article.
The Buried Reformation
The Islamic reform did not always fail. It succeeded repeatedly and was killed each time by external power finding it inconvenient. The reform was replaced by an new overseeing authority which killed it.
The Mutazilite school of the 8th and 9th centuries was Islam’s first great rationalist movement. They argued that the Quran was created, not eternal, which meant it was historically contextual rather than timelessly prescriptive. They argued for reason as an independent source of knowledge alongside revelation. The Abbasid Caliph Al-Mamun made Mutazilism official doctrine in 833 AD. His successors reversed it. The Mutazilites were persecuted. Their library of rational theology was suppressed. Political authority found literalism more useful than rationalism for maintaining power.
The Jadid movement in early 20th century Central Asia is the buried example that disproves the Western assumption that Islam cannot reform from within. Jadidist thinkers in Bukhara, Tashkent, and Samarkand were doing exactly what the Protestant Reformation did in Europe. Rereading foundational texts, challenging clerical authority, separating historical practice from theological necessity, building modern educational institutions inside an Islamic framework. They were Muslims reforming Islam on Islamic terms with Islamic legitimacy. The West ignored the process and its implications entirely.
Ibadi Islam in Oman is the living model that nobody discusses. It is a third tradition entirely outside the Sunni-Shia binary. Quietist, non-expansionist, historically comfortable with religious pluralism, politically stable across centuries. It has been sitting there as a working proof of concept while Western policy discourse treats it as an irrelevant footnote because it requires no management and offers no leverage.
Each of these represents Islam’s genuine internal capacity for reformation. Each was eliminated, suppressed, or ignored by external powers finding indigenous Islamic rationalism strategically inconvenient. A manageable clergy was always preferred over an unmanageable enlightenment.
Lesson from the New Testament
In the early centuries of Christianity, dozens of texts circulated across communities. Gospels, letters, apocalypses, Gnostic texts, wisdom literature. The canonical selection process that produced the New Testament was a political act as much as a theological one.
The Old Testament is extraordinarily violent toward outsiders. Genocide commanded by God. Ethnic cleansing of Canaan. Brutal treatment of neighboring tribes. It is tribalist literature written by the people defining themselves against surrounding cultures. The New Testament editing removed this systematically. Love your enemy is a radical departure from Deuteronomy. The Good Samaritan makes the outsider the moral hero. Paul universalizes the faith across ethnicities.
This was not accidental theology. It was politically necessary for Rome. You cannot administer a multi-ethnic empire on a religion that commands killing outsiders. The canon edit was imperial software engineering. Remove tribalist violence. Add universalist love. Route authority through institutional hierarchy. The combination produced a religion that could scale across the known world.
The texts excluded shared one revealing trait. They emphasized personal, direct access to God without institutional intermediary. That is politically dangerous. You do not need priests or bishops if God speaks directly to you. The selected canon consistently routes authority through apostolic succession. Through the institution.
Al Quran
The operationally dangerous material in Islamic tradition lives primarily not in the Quran but in the Hadith literature. The Hadith are collections of reported sayings and actions of the Prophet compiled by scholars two to three centuries after his death. They were compiled by human beings, organized by human beings, and carry the theological weight of prophetic authority retroactively. Specific prescriptions for violence, for treatment of non-believers, for apostasy, for gender relations live primarily in Hadith rather than in the Quran itself.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has expressed public skepticism about Hadith reliability. That is theologically the same move the Church made when it contextualized Old Testament violence as historical rather than universal prescription. It is intellectually available. It is the most important reform conversation happening in the Islamic world today. And it is happening almost entirely without Western acknowledgment because Western institutions are still looking for the manageable cleric rather than supporting the internal theologian.
The Iranian Trap
Iran’s population did not come into the streets when the bombs fell. Western analysts expressed surprise. They should not have. The silence is structurally explained. First reason is that extrnal attack unite people on nationalism.
Secondly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military force. It is a vertically integrated economic, ideological, and coercive institution with its own survival logic completely independent of whatever theology nominally sits above it. The IRGC controls significant portions of the Iranian economy. It has its own intelligence apparatus, its own foreign policy through proxies, its own patronage networks reaching into every Iranian city. Khamenei’s death changes the theology’s address. It does not change the institution’s interests. The IRGC will manage succession to protect the IRGC. That is what institutions do.
But the deeper explanation for Iranian popular paralysis is the one nobody in Western analysis is willing to name. There is no Jadid Islam available to Iranians as a legitimate alternative framework. No thinker, no movement, no institutional foundation exists that says Iranian Shia identity can survive outside clerical political authority. That intellectual groundwork was never laid because nobody with resources found it strategically useful to lay it.
The Iranian people are trapped in a negative space. They know what they reject. Forty five years of theocratic mismanagement has produced comprehensive exhaustion with Velayat-e Faqih, the guardianship of the jurist doctrine Khomeini invented to create a Shia substitute for the abolished Caliphate. But rejection is not a political program. You cannot build a republic on the foundation of what you are against.
Pakistan is an example of a republic built on hatred. Hindu hatred. The result is that it is an eternal begging suffering society eternally dependent on USA, IMF and Gulf Countries. It has become a mercenary state which supplies terrorists when not its army to the cause of western allies. Like Iran’s IRGC, its army controls the society.
Looking for Luther
There is no Iranian Luther. Not because the intellectual capacity is absent. Iran has one of the most educated and sophisticated populations in the region. But because Luther worked only because he was German challenging a Roman institution. If Luther had been funded by the Ottoman Sultan, nobody would have followed him. The source of reform determines whether it takes root. Every Iranian reformist voice that gains Western attention is immediately delegitimized domestically as a foreign agent. Western fingerprints are the poison.
New bombs will produce new faces on the same architecture. New faces will eventually reproduce the same logic because the architecture demands it.
Iran will not get a reformist exit because there is neither time nor opportunity to develop it.
The Djinn and the Empty Bottle
There is a reason why people say they hate that country or hate those people without being able to articulate why precisely. They are carrying civilizational frustrations they have no theological or political language to express. The intellectual tools for critiquing the ideas have been systematically suppressed for a century. It comes out as hatred of people because the hatred of ideas has nowhere to go.
Western powers are standing on the shore holding an empty bottle. The thought is autonomous now. It has been reproduced across a billion minds in a hundred countries across several generations. You cannot recall it. No air campaign reaches it. No leadership decapitation addresses it. No regime change touches it.
The machinery of suppression continues to make the problem worse. Rational internal Islamic critique that reads Quranic violence as 7th century Arabian political context gets blocked by algorithms and excluded from platforms. Postcolonial apologetics that mystifies the phenomenon gets published, awarded, and cited in policy documents. The institutions are selecting for ignorance and calling it protection.
This is why a senior UAE minister warned Europe years ago with words that deserve to be remembered precisely. He said to European audiences in English: you think you know Islam better than us. You do not. A time will come when more terrorists will come out of Europe than from Islamic countries. He was not making a threat. He was making a diagnosis. Indigenous Muslim societies have immune systems developed over centuries for containing political Islam’s more explosive tendencies. Customary practice, Sufi tradition, local authority structures, pragmatic jurisprudence. Europe imported the theology and left the immune system behind. Besides, it provided the adrenal of free speech unavailable in Islamic Societies.
The Only Hope
Mohammed bin Salman is an imperfect vehicle for an essential project. His skepticism about Hadith, his social liberalization inside Saudi Arabia, his Vision 2030 attempt to build a post-oil identity for Saudi society are all moves in the direction the situation requires. They are self-interested moves. They are also the only visible example of a Muslim leader with genuine institutional authority attempting to create theological space for internal reform.
The condition for that project to succeed is the one thing Western powers find most difficult. Complete withdrawal of visible hands. No funding of moderate clerics with Western institutional fingerprints. No NGOs translating Islamic reform into human rights vocabulary that is automatically contaminated by association. No American democracy promotion programs that hand hardliners their most powerful recruitment argument.
The reformation has to be indigenous to be legitimate. This is not a new principle. It is the lesson of every successful religious reformation in history. It takes generations. It requires making catastrophic errors along the way. It cannot be project managed from Washington or Brussels or Tel Aviv.
The hardest truth this analysis arrives at is this. Western institutions cannot implement this solution because withdrawal requires admitting that a century of interventions were wrong. That admission has domestic political costs nobody in any Western capital is currently willing to pay.
Yet, I hope those in power wake up to their own follies. But I doubt it. There is no addiction greater than the addiction of control.
So the mismanagement continues. The symptoms are treated with bombs. The cause remains untouched underneath the rubble. The unanswered question of 1924 waits in the dust of Tehran for whoever emerges to try answering it again.
The djinn does not negotiate with the people holding the empty bottle.
References:
- Mahomedan Law by D.F. Mulla
- Facts are Facts by Afzal Wali Khan
- A History of the Muslim World since 1260 by Vernon O. Egger (2018)
- The Punjab, Bloodied, Partition and Cleansed by Ishtiaq Ahmed
- Muslim Separatism: Causes and Consequences by Sita Ram Goel
- The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians by HM Elliot
- What is Grooming Gang: https://theweek.com/crime/the-grooming-gangs-scandal-explained
- Grooming Gangs: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/31/how-grooming-victims-were-failed-oldham-children
- Katie Lam says Govt. want to cover up: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/38412594/katie-lam-grooming-gangs-scandal-government-cover-up/
- Warning of UAE Minister Abdullah Bin Zayed: https://allarab.news/i-told-you-so-uae-foreign-ministers-2017-warning-comes-true-amid-campus-turmoil-in-us-and-europe/