The Theology of the Few: When Jannati Declared War on the Majority

Historians looking for the roots of the current civil war often point to economic sanctions or political corruption. But to understand the sheer brutality of the regime’s last stand in 2026 one must look at the ideology that justified it decades ago. In September 2007 Ahmad Jannati, one of the most powerful clerics in the Islamic Republic, stood before a crowd and handed the state a blank check for repression. His words were not just a sermon but a declaration of intent. “In Islam,” he said, “the majority has always been with the people of falsehood and the minority with the people of truth.”

That single sentence encapsulates the tragedy of the last nineteen years. By framing the majority of the population as inherently aligned with “evil” Jannati stripped the Iranian people of their political legitimacy. If the majority is wrong by divine definition then democracy is not just unnecessary it is a sin. This philosophy explains why the government felt no remorse in crushing the 2009 Green Movement or the bloody uprisings of the 2020s. In their worldview they were not oppressing their citizens; they were a righteous minority fighting a holy war against a misguided mob.

Jannati’s speech also laid bare the regime’s obsession with loyalty over competence. He explicitly stated that he supported President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad solely because the Supreme Leader did. He praised the government’s crackdown on the student protests of July 1999, referring to the violently suppressed unrest as a plot against Islam. Even then he lamented that some provincial governors refused to cooperate with the crackdown. From the perspective of 2026 those hesitant governors look like the last gasp of a system that still had some connection to reality before the hardliners took total control.

Perhaps most chilling was his invocation of the apocalypse. Jannati framed the Iranian revolution not as a system of governance but as the prelude to the return of the Hidden Imam. He argued that the world was mobilizing to “extinguish the divine light.” When a government believes it is the only thing standing between the world and spiritual darkness it stops negotiating. It stops listening. It simply reloads. The violence we see in the streets of Tehran today is the inevitable conclusion of the doctrine Jannati preached in 2007. The “righteous minority” is now fighting its final battle against the country it claimed to save.