Perhaps the clearest indication of how important the protests in Iran are to Lebanon, and of how deeply Lebanon is affected by their trajectory and possible outcomes, especially the prospect of the Supreme Leader’s regime falling, comes from Hezbollah and its supporters.
Their outrage at images of Iranian women burning pictures of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, the hostile reactions directed at Lebanese people, particularly Shiite communities who shared these images online, sometimes escalating to threats, and the call by one Hezbollah-affiliated media figure urging supporters to defend the rule of the Supreme Leader as a “duty,” are all enough to answer the question: what do the protests in Iran have to do with you?
These reactions underscore the extent of the theocratic regime’s influence in Tehran over the Lebanese arena, particularly in areas where its supporters dominate and where its influence extends. It is an arena whose details are tightly controlled, making the fall of that regime a prospect with positive repercussions for the liberation of Lebanese women and men from this grip.
As a woman who was born and raised in a Shiite community where Hezbollah’s influence and dominance steadily expanded, and where profound changes in social surroundings and ways of life unfolded over three decades under that dominance, and having witnessed the extent of women’s suffering as a result, the fall of the Iranian regime matters to me. Quite simply, it is a system that violently controls the most basic details of the society in which I grew up, especially the lives of its women.
It is a regime that governed our bodies as much as it could, through Lebanese hands. While Lebanon’s diversity has prevented wilayat al-faqih from imposing absolute control, it continues to strive for that goal today, and Khamenei’s followers in Lebanon openly work toward it.
Liberating identity
The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, succeeded in exporting his “revolution” to Lebanon, even if Lebanon never fully embraced it. Money, weapons, and ideology became tools of attraction and recruitment, assigning individuals the task of imposing Khomeinist doctrine on the rest of society. Once recruited, the individual became responsible for enforcing the hijab and other “duties” on women within their family and surroundings, as well as recruiting boys.
The Iranian regime’s impact was clearly visible in the transformation of the identity of Shiite towns and villages where Hezbollah, the Lebanese branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, took control. Women’s dress codes, often a reflection of a place’s identity and culture, quickly changed, and many customs were replaced to align with the jurist’s fatwas. Black clothing increasingly replaced colorful attire and white headscarves, turning the color of mourning into the dominant hue in villages where Hezbollah convinced many residents of the duty to fight and to seek martyrdom.
The system of absolute wilayat al-faqih even managed to control relationships within Shiite families in Lebanon, weakening them in favor of loyalty to the ruler. The family, defined as the smallest social unit, becomes a gateway to controlling society as a whole and subjecting it.
Hezbollah, as the representative of the “Islamic Revolution in Lebanon,” succeeded in turning Khamenei’s followers into tools of repression that seek to control our lifestyles and bodies, enforce the hijab and “Zaynabi dress” on women in various ways, including through women’s committees inside universities. More than that, Khomeini’s ideology transformed people around us into fighters ready to target us at any moment in the name of a “religious duty,” treating dissent as rebellion against the sacred.
Controlling natural emotions
Beyond this, Khomeinist ideas affected society to the point of controlling and condemning natural human emotions, forcing communities to deny and suppress them. This repression became painfully visible during the most recent war, in scenes of mothers suppressing their grief over sons who were killed. Women are expected to express pride and readiness to sacrifice more sons as a duty, rather than to mourn. Those who display natural emotions such as fear or sadness are treated as weak in spirit and faith.
The Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon
Today, little is known about the movements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon, nor about what the regime’s guards, who are suppressing protests in Iran, are planning for a country that emerged just over a year ago from a devastating war in which the Revolutionary Guard played a central decision-making role and directed its battles.
Events of recent years and statements by Iranian officials have shown that Hezbollah follows orders and wages its wars under Iranian supervision. The Revolutionary Guard has the final say in decisions of war and peace in Lebanon, with its commanders managing these wars from Lebanese territory alongside Hezbollah’s leadership, foremost among them its secretary-general.
The late commander of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, admitted in a televised interview that he was alongside the late Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in the command room during the July 2006 war. Nasrallah was later assassinated in Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs, alongside Abbas Nilforoushan, a commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in the same command center—further confirming the Guard’s role in making existential decisions in place of the Lebanese.
Women’s liberation and fate
All of this, and more, shows that the fall of religious rule in Iran would liberate Shiite women in Lebanon from its domination and free the society in which I was born from the concept of religious duty that has turned young men into fighters seeking martyrdom rather than life. It would also free society from attempts to deal with the consequences of young men’s deaths and women’s widowhood by promoting various forms of legal and social exploitation of women.
If we move beyond the details of daily life dominated by the Iranian Supreme Leader, whose oath of loyalty is now echoed in national university campuses where activities that contradict his fatwas are banned, and return to the reality of Lebanon facing the threat of another Israeli war, it becomes clear that the fall of the Iranian regime would free the fate of Lebanese people from being held hostage to it. The course of the war has shown that Iranian calculations override Lebanese interests, calculations that constrained Hezbollah’s capabilities before Israel delivered devastating blows.
Even when Lebanon’s Shiites faced the prospect of a Gaza-like scenario, the Iranian regime, through its officials and Hezbollah, insisted on defiance and confrontation with Lebanese state decisions. Iran continues to treat Hezbollah as a bargaining chip that can be used regardless of the suffering of its supporters or the risk of a new, even more destructive war. After the ceasefire, the Iranian regime once again used Lebanon as an arena to issue threats to protect itself.
The reactions of Hezbollah supporters who attacked Iran after Nasrallah’s assassination, accusing it of abandonment and betrayal, further underscore the importance of separating Lebanon’s path and fate from the Iranian regime. Hezbollah’s intransigence suggests that such a separation will not be possible without the fall of the Supreme Leader.
The fall of the Iranian regime is not only about Iran’s internal scene or a power struggle there. It is an event that would redefine authority in Shiite environments outside Iran, particularly in Lebanon, where women form the first line of defense against religious authority over the body, identity, and emotion. If the regime in Tehran secured its tools of rule in Lebanon through weapons, ideology, and the family institution, its fall opens a horizon for liberating women from wilayat al-faqih and for liberating Lebanon from its role as a battlefield.
The reactions of Hezbollah supporters after Nasrallah’s assassination, accusing Iran of abandonment and betrayal, reflect the internal erosion of this guardianship. This moment reveals the possibility of separating the Lebanese fate from the Iranian one, separating the Lebanese body from the body of the Islamic Revolution. Accordingly, the fall of the regime in Iran becomes an event that concerns Lebanese people as much as it concerns Iranians, shaping their political, social, and gendered futures alike.
