Deploying Iran’s Imperial Imagery: Reclaiming Anti-Arab Symbolism to Confront Iran’s Arab-Islamic Regime

Deploying Iran’s Imperial Imagery: Reclaiming Anti-Arab Symbolism to Confront Iran’s Arab-Islamic Regime

Shapour Suren-Pahlav

09 November 2025

Introduction

On 7 November 2025, the Islamic regime in Iran unveiled a colossal statue in Tehran, purporting to depict the third-century Roman ruler Valerian kneeling before the mounted figure of Shapur I (the Great), the Sasanian Emperor who famously defeated him and two other Roman rulers in the 3rd century CE (Iran Students’ News Agency, 2025).

 

The statue, though executed with striking artistic ineptitude and crude workmanship (right image), stands as a reflection of the broader cultural and material decay that has followed the 1979 collapse of Iran’s imperial order. Where once meritocratic excellence governed public commissions under a cultivated elite, it is now clerical mediocrity and ideological kitsch that dominate the public sphere, a kakistocracy in stone. The statue, erected under the banner of the ‘Kneel Before Iran’ campaign, is intended as a triumphalist assertion of Iranian strength vis-à-vis the West. Yet the monument betrays its own narrative. The kneeling figure, drawn from the original bas-relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, is not Valerian but Philip the Arab, a Roman ruler of Syrian (Arab) origin who had earlier sued for peace with the Sasanian Empire.

 

The regime, in its haste to manufacture spectacle, unwittingly re-inscribed a very different historical logic, one in which a Persian Emperor humbles an Arab ruler. This is an irony that strikes at the heart of the regime itself: adhering to Islam, an Arabic faith, and its leaders, who call themselves Sayyid (Suren‑Pahlav, 2001), claim descent from Muhammad, Islam’s Arabian progenitor.

 

And this blunder offers an opportunity to turn the regime’s own propaganda apparatus against itself. Through a careful historical reading of the Naqsh-e Rostam relief and its ideological repurposing in the Tehran statue, the work examines how visual propaganda, rooted in selective memory, misattribution, and symbolic staging, can be reversed and re-appropriated by those it seeks to silence. Rather than reject the regime’s imagery outright, this paper explores strategies of détournement: leveraging the regime’s visual lexicon to expose its internal contradictions, colonial borrowings, and fundamental estrangement from Iran’s pre-Islamic identity.

 

What emerges is not merely a critique of aesthetic manipulation but a broader inquiry into how historical iconography can be repossessed by publics under ideological siege. As this case demonstrates, when the machinery of propaganda misfires, it opens a space not only for irony and ridicule but for political counter-narration grounded in cultural legitimacy.

 

 

Lessons from the history: A History of Counter-Propaganda through Re-appropriation

Throughout history, regimes, religious bodies, and ideological institutions have instrumentalised art and imagery to fabricate authority, rewrite past conflicts, and shape future loyalties. Yet just as propaganda seeks to close interpretive space, counter-propaganda reopens it, often by turning the regime's own symbols against itself. The process of reversing such state-orchestrated iconography, particularly monumental forms like sculpture and bas-relief, is not merely a visual subversion but a form of historical reclamation.

 

In early modern Europe, Protestant reformers took Catholic iconography and rendered it grotesque, parodying saints and reconfiguring church frescos to expose what they deemed idolatry. The imagery remained recognisable, its authority, however, was now undermined. This became a consistent method in periods of revolutionary struggle: laughter at power became a weapon of the powerless.

 

The 20th century offered even clearer methods of counter-imagery. Soviet dissidents reworked socialist realism in clandestine exhibitions, maintaining its aesthetic while nullifying its ideological fidelity. The visual language was maintained; the referent inverted. In fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, underground artists mimicked state-sanctioned forms only to expose their emptiness, satirical echoes that visually resembled loyalty but carried subversive payloads. These were not acts of destruction, but of détournement: hijacking a message from within.

 

Digital cultures continue this tradition. In contemporary Iran, memes and altered state media clips circulate widely as semiotic sabotage, particularly when state symbolism betrays its own incoherence. What once functioned as a unifying myth is fractured under the weight of irony. Satire does not merely mock, it disarms.

 

To reverse propaganda, then, is to possess it. Not to destroy the image but to contaminate it from within, historically, aesthetically, and semantically. Where the regime seeks monologue, counter-propaganda insists on dialogue. Where the state constructs fixed meaning, the dissident proposes instability, ambiguity, and return to contested historical fact.

 

In the case of the statue in Tehran, this tradition continues. A monument lifted from Iran’s ancient history, meant to portray triumph over the West but inadvertently displays a Persian emperor humiliating an Arab ruler. The regime's attempt at grandeur is historically illiterate. The irony is total. To exploit this is not iconoclasm; it is precision historiography.

 

 

Deploying Imperial Imagery: Reclaiming Anti-Arab Symbolism to Confront Iran’s Arab-Islamic Regime

The very propaganda that the Islamic regime intended to project nationalist defiance against the West can, and must, be repurposed to expose the regime’s ideological dissonance.

 

For over four decades, the Islamic regime has for decades systematically eroded the foundations of Iranian national identity by supplanting it with the supranational ethos of the Islamic–Arabian Ummah (Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies, 2009; Suren‑Pahlav,  2023). This effort has involved an ongoing cultural and political campaign against Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage, vilifying that legacy as tyrannical and attempting to sever its continuity in public consciousness. The paradox, however, is that the same regime now appeals to the symbolism of pre-Islamic imperial grandeur, selectively invoking figures such as Cyrus the Great or Shapur I, when convenient for external posturing.

 

This contradiction can be turned decisively against the regime. If the Islamic regime presents itself as the heir to Iranian nationalism, it must then be held accountable to the historical content of that nationalism, rooted not in the Islamic–Arabian tradition to which its ruling class lays genealogical and ideological claim, but in the distinct civilisational legacy of ancient Iran. By exposing the regime’s instrumental appropriation of this imagery, Iranians can reassert the primacy of Persian identity over its imposed Arab-Islamic counterpart. The Tehran statue, intended as a spectacle of anti-Western defiance, instead provides a potent visual argument: it is not a Western figure humbled by Persian might, but an Arab ruler brought to his knees. The regime, despite its rhetoric, has inadvertently conjured the very narrative it seeks to suppress, Iranian sovereignty against Arab rule.

 

The historical record offers further symbolic ammunition. It was none other than the Sasanian emperor Khosrow II, ruler of a vast and cosmopolitan empire, who famously rejected Islam when approached by the Prophet Muhammad. His dismissal was not merely personal but civilisational: a refusal to subordinate an imperial Iranian tradition to a nascent Arab religious-political order. That moment, often recast in Islamic historiography as arrogance, can now be reinterpreted as an assertion of Iranian autonomy in the face of ideological encroachment. Much of the international media coverage, including ostensibly oppositional outlets, has echoed the regime’s symbolism uncritically, failing to interrogate its historical illiteracy or its strategic co-optation of national identity.

 

Today, the descendants of that same religious-political order govern Iran under the banner of the Islamic regime. The ruling clerical elite, who claim descent from the Prophet and allegiance to his vision, are not the custodians of Iranian identity but the heirs of the very project Khosrow II resisted. In this light, the rejection of the Islamic regime by contemporary Iranians is not merely political dissent; it is the continuation of a historical refusal, a return to civilisational self-definition. As Khosrow once rejected Arab-Islamic hegemony, so too do Iranians today reclaim their cultural and political agency by rejecting its modern theocratic embodiment.

 

Finally, it must be clearly stated that the West and Israel are not merely external opponents of the Islamic regime; they are historically complicit in its survival. It was the Western powers, led by the United States, that enabled the clerical seizure of power in 1979, dismantling Iran’s imperial government—one that, in both essence and commitment, was Iranian and oriented towards the welfare of the Iranian nation. Since then, their calculated diplomacy, intermittent sanctions, and managed antagonisms have served not to dismantle the regime but to entrench it, furnishing it with the external threats it requires to justify domestic repression. Far from being oppositional forces, the West and Israel have, in effect, served as the regime’s strategic oxygen. The Iranian nation therefore faces a dual betrayal: from the pro-Arab regime that governs them, and from the self-interested, morally bankrupt global powers that have sustained it.

 

 

Conclusion

The Islamic regime’s attempt to manufacture legitimacy through selective appropriation of Iran’s imperial past has exposed a fundamental contradiction at the heart of its project. In reviving the image of Shapur the Great subjugating a Roman ruler, mistakenly identified, the regime has unintentionally summoned the spectre of Iranian resistance against Arab imposition. This misstep is not merely symbolic; it is symptomatic of a broader crisis in ideological coherence, wherein an Arab-Islamic regime seeks refuge in the very cultural memory it has long sought to erase.

 

By reclaiming the regime’s own imagery and reinterpreting it through the lens of historical accuracy and national consciousness, Iranians are not simply mocking state propaganda, they are repossessing their past. What was meant as a spectacle of anti-Western bravado now stands as a visual testament to the enduring divide between Iranian identity and the Arab-Islamic order imposed upon it. The act of reversal is not iconoclastic; it is restorative.

 

In this moment of dissonance, the opportunity arises not only to discredit the regime’s narratives, but to reassert a civilisational continuity long suppressed. What Shapur the Great represented in stone, and Khosrow affirmed in defiance, returns now as a cultural reckoning. The imagery is theirs, until it is reclaimed.

 

This strategy of reversal must not remain symbolic alone. Every mural, slogan, and monument erected by the regime is vulnerable to re-reading. Each of their images can be exposed as hollow, each symbol turned against its master. Let every Iranian look again at what the regime shows them, and see not obedience, but opportunity. Theirs is the image. The meaning is ours to decide.

 

 

References:

All Rights Reserved, تمامی حقوق محفوظ می باشد

Copyright © 1997 Shapour Suren-Pahlav

Share this