In a previous essay, I argued that the Islamic Republic, unlike most of its Arab neighbors, did not emerge from the cartographic fantasies of Sykes–Picot, but from a far deeper historical and cultural continuity. Iran is not an assemblage; it is a civilizational heir.

The Revolution of 1979, whatever else one may say about it, tapped into that continuity and wrapped it in an explicitly Islamic idiom. In that sense, the Islamic Republic has always enjoyed a kind of indigenous legitimacy that Syria, Iraq or Lebanon never quite managed, precisely because they were asked to be states before they had time to be nations.

The question I want to pose now is a simple one with complicated implications: if the problem is the endurance of the Iranian Revolution, what if the surest way to keep it alive is not more executions and more ideological rigidity, but a small internal correction? If the Revolution’s strength has come from its rootedness in Shiʿi culture and Iranian history, could a modest but meaningful adjustment within that same Shiʿi framework make it more enduring rather than less? Put differently: what would happen to the durability of the Islamic Republic if it chose, not under Western pressure but by appealing to its own theological resources, to renounce the death penalty – including for the great symbolic crime of apostasy?

This is not a liberal fantasy grafted onto Qom. It is, in fact, a line of evolution that exists within Shiʿism itself.

Shiʿism between Power and Restraint

The Revolution’s great legal-theological gamble was Khomeini’s theory of velayat-e faqih, elaborated in Najaf in the 1970s. It authorized a clerical state where Twelver orthodoxy had long preached political patience in the time of the Hidden Imam. That move allowed Islam, in Iran, to become not only a faith but a governing ideology. It was the alchemy that transformed rituals of mourning for Hussain into legislation, budgets, and ministries.

Yet the same tradition Khomeini drew upon contains another strand: a deep suspicion of fallible rulers claiming to wield God’s most drastic punishments in the Imam’s absence. For centuries, many Shiʿi jurists held that the full application of the hudūd – the fixed, often lethal punishments of classical law – belonged properly to the infallible Imam. In practice, this meant a great deal of hesitation, delay, and reluctance to kill in God’s name. The famous injunction to “ward off hudūd by doubts” is not a footnote; it is a moral instinct.

In the post-revolutionary period, this instinct surfaced in uneasy, sometimes tragic ways. Ayatollah Montazeri’s protest against the 1988 prison massacres, which cost him the succession, was not a liberal pamphlet smuggled in from Paris; it was a Shiʿi conscience speaking from inside the house, warning that an Islamic state was turning executions into a reflex and thereby cheapening the very religion it claimed to defend. Others, more quietly, have made similar arguments about the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy, pointing out that the Qurʾan itself prescribes no worldly execution for changing one’s belief.

This is where the endurance of the Revolution intersects with its theology. A system that began as a rebellion against foreign domination, and as a reclamation of indigenous moral order, now routinely ranks among the world leaders in executions per capita. Its security reflex has become the hangman’s noose. The Revolution, which presented itself as a defense of the oppressed, too often appears – to its own children – as an engine of fear. That is not a recipe for longevity.

Death, Apostasy, and the Cost of Rigidity

The insistence on capital punishment is not just a juridical question. It has become part of the Islamic Republic’s political identity: the ability to kill quickly and publicly, whether for drug offences, political dissent or alleged offences against religion, is presented as proof of resolve. By most counts, Iran executed around 863 people last year – a staggering figure that puts it near the top of the global league tables for capital punishment and does nothing to improve the image of a state that claims to speak for the oppressed and the dispossessed. The rope stands in for legitimacy.

Yet the same state that invokes Hussain’s sacrifice and Hussain’s injustice now finds itself executing young protesters whose only crime was to shout slogans, burn a scarf, or insult sacred symbols. In a society where half the population is under thirty, and where the memory of the Shah’s SAVAK is never far away, this repetition of the old pattern – torture chambers replaced by revolutionary courts – chips steadily at the Revolution’s moral capital.

From a purely strategic standpoint, it is also wasteful. Every execution generates a martyr, and every martyr generates a reservoir of private hatred. The state gains a momentary shiver of fear; it loses a decade of trust. If the endurance of the Revolution depends on a minimum of reconciled consent rather than permanent occupation of its own society, it is difficult to see how the current punitive trajectory is sustainable.

The irony is that the Islamic Republic does not need the death penalty to remain Islamic, nor to remain revolutionary. It could abolish it tomorrow – including for apostasy – using arguments fully compatible with Twelver Shiʿism: the absence of the Imam, the ambiguity of the historical evidence, the Qurʾanic bias toward forgiveness, the prophetic reluctance to punish in cases of doubt. A Leader who wished to do so would not have to borrow a single line from a French philosopher. He could quote the Qurʾan, Nahj al-Balāgha, and a long list of Shiʿi jurists.

An Islamic Republic without the Rope

What would such a shift look like in practice?

It would not be a secular coup. The constitution would remain Islamic in its grammar. The Guardian Council would continue to vet laws for conformity with “Islamic criteria.” The Friday prayers would not suddenly become TED talks. The clergy would still have their veto points.

The change would come in the state’s self-limitation. The Supreme Leader – the same office that once authorized the largest wave of executions in post-revolutionary history – would announce that, in the era of Occultation and in light of the pervasive “doubts” of modern criminal procedure, the Islamic Republic no longer considers itself authorized to apply hudūd punishments that destroy life or limb. Qiṣāṣ in murder cases would remain as a moral and legal category, but the preferred outcome would be forgiveness and compensation, not execution. Apostasy would cease to be a crime; belief, or its absence, would be treated as God’s business, not that of the state.

Such a declaration would not empty the prisons overnight. Iran would still have thieves, smugglers, spies, and corrupt officials. The security services would still have work. But the symbolic center of gravity would shift. The Republic would no longer present itself to its own people and to the world with a gallows in the background. It would be an Islamic Republic that has chosen restraint, not because Amnesty International asked politely, but because its own theology told it that fallible human beings should not pretend to wield God’s irreversible punishments.

One can easily imagine the objections from within the system. Without the threat of death, will we not see more dissent, more crime, more “Westernization”? Perhaps, in the short term, the security establishment would feel naked. But an honest account of the past four decades suggests that the rope has not prevented dissent; it has merely radicalized it. The mass protests of recent years erupted despite – and in part because of – the state’s willingness to kill. By contrast, a state that renounces executions retains other means of enforcing its laws, but starts to recover one resource it has squandered: the grudging respect of the governed.

Appeal and Endurance

The Iranian Revolution has outlasted predictions of collapse because it was never just a coup. It was a revolt of the periphery against the center, of the bazaar and the village against the palace, of an old moral vocabulary against imported blueprints. Its endurance so far has depended on three overlapping sources of legitimacy: anti-imperialism, cultural authenticity, and a promise of social justice. All three have been eroded, to varying degrees, by the Republic’s own behavior.

Renouncing the death penalty would not magically solve Iran’s economic crisis, nor would it resolve the contradictions of velayat-e faqih. But it would send a powerful signal that the system is still capable of self-correction from within its own tradition. It would recall the better instincts of Shiʿism: the suspicion of tyrants, the sanctity of blood, the idea that in the Imam’s absence no ruler is allowed to play God.

Externally, it would complicate the narrative of Iran as an irredeemable pariah state. A non-executing Islamic Republic would not suddenly become a Western liberal democracy, but it would be a very different kind of actor in the international system: still assertive, still jealous of its sovereignty, yet no longer so easily portrayed as a medieval hangman.

Internally, it would ease the intergenerational fracture. The grandchildren of the Revolution, who have no memory of the Shah but vivid memories of friends hanged for protesting, might begin to see the state as something other than an enemy. The religious middle classes, tired of watching the faith they cherish associated with televised hangings at dawn, would no longer be forced to choose between their piety and their conscience.

For a system born in blood, choosing not to shed it is not weakness. It is a declaration of maturity. The Islamic Republic has proved, over four and a half decades, that it can survive war, sanctions, isolation, and cycles of protest. The next test is subtler: whether it can survive its own habits. The endurance of the Iranian Revolution may depend less on its ability to threaten death and more on its ability, finally, to renounce it.

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