MADRID – In the tumultuous arena of global politics, few nations bear symbols as dense and varied as Iran. But while each of these images belongs to a distinct narrative, they all coexist within the body of a single state. 

Behind this apparent incoherence lies the continuity of a deeper conflict: the struggle to define sovereignty in an era where global power continues to shape the margins of the possible.

For over a century, Iran has waged a battle, sometimes silent and other times bloody, for its political and moral independence. The question that runs through its modern history is how to maintain sovereignty in a world designed from the outside. During the 20th century, this search took two contrasting forms: a secular nationalism, of monarchical roots, that aspired to replicate Western modernity, and a revolutionary Islamic project that championed political-spiritual independence as the condition for all political freedom. But to understand Iran in these binary terms is, in reality, to succumb to the simplification the country has most fiercely contested.

The idea of an Iran divided between a pre-Islamic Aryan soul and an Islamic body is not an authentic self-perception, but an invention with colonial roots. In the 19th century, European Orientalist scholarship projected onto Persia the desire to find a noble civilization of "Aryan" ancestry that would serve as a domesticated mirror of their own identity. By separating Zoroastrian Persia—luminous and rational—from Islamic Persia, described as decadent and fanatical, the Orientalists created a tool of power: a genealogy that justified intervention and tutelage.

This framework found an echo within the Persian elites of the 20th century. With the arrival of Reza Shah Pahlavi, pre-Islamic nationalism became the official ideology of a modernizing and authoritarian state. The purpose was twofold: to eradicate Islam as a political force and to fabricate a national identity based on the imperial glory of the Achaemenids. The lavish celebration of 2,500 years of monarchy at Persepolis in 1971 was not merely an archaeological exaltation. It was the staging of a calculated leap over Islamic history, an attempt to link the Shah's throne with that of Cyrus, erasing thirteen centuries of popular religious culture.

Through this gesture, the Pahlavi project sought to replace the community of believers with the nation, and faith with loyalty to the state. What was presented as "modernization" was also a form of forced secularization, sustained by political violence and external dependence. The rupture, paradoxically, did not occur in the 7th century with the arrival of Islam, but in the 20th century, when a power that claimed to be sovereign adopted the categories of the colonizer to define itself against its own people.

Faced with this cultural engineering, what emerged was not a simple resurgence of religious fervor, but the recompositing of an old aspiration: to unite justice, faith, and sovereignty. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was the culmination of a process of cultural resistance that had matured in the networks of the clergy, the bazaars, political poetry, and the spaces where Islamic identity functioned as a refuge from Western homogenization. From this perspective, Islam was the grammar with which Iran recovered its voice in the global concert.

What gave strength to the revolutionary discourse was not nostalgia for a lost past, but its capacity to transform faith into an ethic of independence. Central concepts of Shiism—the Hidden Imam, the justice of the martyr of Karbala, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist (velayat-e faqih)—became political arguments against the illegitimacy of a power serving foreign interests. Where secular nationalism had offered modernity in exchange for subordination, revolutionary Islam proposed its own modernity, not dependent on international approval.

The Islamic Revolution did not demolish the Persian past; it reread it. In its ideological formulation, Achaemenid grandeur and the Quranic message cease to be antagonistic and are inscribed in an ethical continuity. The Cyrus Cylinder, presented during the Pahlavi period as a precursor to the Human Rights Declaration, acquires another reading in the post-revolutionary framework: justice as a divine mandate and not as an imperial gift.

In this sense, the Islamic Republic is also a hermeneutics of the past. It does not deny it: it interprets it and resignifies it within a theological-political horizon where sovereignty belongs, ultimately, to God, but is exercised through the community of believers.

Today, that dispute continues. Western-based media outlets tell the Iranian people that they must call for a return to a secular Persian nationalism, and that political Islam prevents the country's opening to the world. People are told that Iran's current political configuration has diluted the "Aryan" essence in an imposed “Arabization”. The Islamic Republic, for its part, considers this discourse a re-edition of the colonial ideology that sought to separate Iranians from their Islamic soul to reintegrate them into the Western orbit.

The Islamic Republic has, in recent years, paid closer attention to these Western efforts and intensified its attempts to articulate its historical roots with its Islamic identity.

The rehabilitation of figures like Cyrus the Great, the restoration of Persepolis, or the use of Persian symbols in cultural and international spaces evidence this effort to integrate pre-Islamic civilizational elements into a revolutionary narrative that maintains Islam as its central axis. 

The process is not without challenges. On one hand, political Islam, which emerged as a renewal against secular nationalism, sometimes incorporates symbols and historical references linked to Iran's rich monarchical tradition, integrating them into its project without losing the Islamic framework that defines it. On the other hand, this Persian reinterpretation seeks to overcome the colonial vision that pitted the "Aryan" against Islam, articulating both traditions as complementary and harmonious dimensions. In this vision, being Iranian and being Muslim are not conflicting identities, but two interrelated aspects of a common legacy in which Islamic identity orients and gives cohesion to Persian historical and cultural memory.

At this point, Iranian politics reaches a philosophical and political complexity: the resistance is not simply between past and present, but between a resignified pre-Islamic memory and a sovereignty founded on Shiite divine law. The articulation between these two languages—the civilizational and the spiritual—is an ongoing dialogue. The Islamic Republic experiments with a synthesis that, beyond its internal contradictions, seeks to articulate a vision of sovereignty worthy of its history and its present on the global stage.