Iran has a long history of defying bullies. Trump has reaped the whirlwind
Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Wed, 04/22/2026 - 08:16
The people of our region do not yield to occupation or arrogance, instead we manifest our collective dignity. It is an immeasurable force
Iranians wave the national flag during a rally amid a ceasefire in the US-Israel war on Iran on 22 April, 2026 (Reuters) On The modern history of the Middle East can be read as a single, enduring dialectic: humiliation and the revolutions of dignity it produces.
Since the first waves of colonial intrusion, the region has been shaped by this pattern. Iran offers one of its most condensed expressions, though it is not the only one.
In 1892, a single ruling issued from Najaf brought a country to a halt. Across Iran, people stopped smoking overnight, in bazaars, in homes, even in the royal court.
It was not about tobacco. It was about humiliation. A nation had been handed over to foreign control, and for the first time, it refused.
There is a simple rule in politics that empires repeatedly fail to understand. Humiliation does not produce submission. It produces resistance.
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It settles slowly, embeds deeply, and returns sharper, harder, and more dangerous than before. It is not forgotten. It accumulates. And when it matures, it does not return as compliance, but as defiance.
Radical defiance
Iran’s modern history is the history of that accumulation. The tobacco boycott was not an isolated episode. It revealed something fundamental; a people bound by violated dignity can force the collapse of both domestic authority and foreign control.
From that moment, something deeper began to take shape. The alliance between religious authority, merchants and the wider public did not dissipate. It evolved.
A people bound by violated dignity can force the collapse of both domestic authority and foreign control
By 1906, it crystallised into the Constitutional Revolution, known in Persian as the Mashruteh Revolution, one of the earliest mass demands for accountable government in the modern Middle East.
For the first time, a parliament was established under the Qajar dynasty. It was an attempt to restrain arbitrary power and institutionalise political participation. It marked a shift. Resistance moved toward structure. Refusal moved toward governance.
Then came Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1951, he nationalised Iran’s oil, ending decades of British domination through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For a brief moment, sovereignty seemed possible. It lasted two years.
In 1953, a coup orchestrated by the United States and Britain removed him, restoring the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and entrenching foreign control. The message was unmistakable. Independence would not be tolerated.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not an eruption in isolation. It was an accumulation, insult upon insult, interference upon interference, submission imposed again and again. It was the radical expression of that history.
To dismiss it as the work of a few "crazy mullahs", stripped of context, is not analysis. It is grotesque simplification.
The same shallow ignorance runs through the American administration’s view of Iran today. In Donald Trump’s language, it is reduced to "crazy bastards" and "mad mullahs".
This ignorance explains the present failure. A chronic inability to understand Iran and the region as they are, their histories, their political evolution, their social fabric, their cultures, and their memory, is not merely ignorance.
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It is historical blindness.
History's fault lines
And Iran was not alone. Across the region, under colonial rule, the same pattern emerged. Domination did not produce passivity. It produced resistance.
The excess violence used in the 19th century to subdue the region did not produce obedience, but successive waves of revolt.
This pattern did not appear all at once. It unfolded over time, across generations, each episode adding another layer to a shared historical memory.
Even those who withdrew from politics could not remain untouched. Sufi movements, rooted in spiritual purification, were drawn outward under pressure. The inward turned outward.
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In Algeria, Emir Abdelkader led the struggle against French occupation (1830-47). A Sufi scholar, he was drawn from contemplation into war, building a state in the interior and organising disciplined resistance against a vastly superior imperial force.
In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad led the Mahdist uprising (1881-85), transforming a religious revival into a mass movement that captured Khartoum and brought down a regime backed by imperial power.
In Libya, the Senussi Order transformed spiritual networks into a system of resistance against Italian invasion, sustaining a long war of survival that raged from 1911 into the 1920s and 1930s.
In northern Morocco, Abdelkrim El Khattabi led the Rif Revolt from (1921-26), uniting tribes, defeating Spanish colonial forces at Annual in 1921, and establishing a republic in the mountains before a joint intervention by Spain and France brought it down.
Across Central Asia, throughout the 19th century, Naqshbandi networks became channels of resistance to Russian imperial expansion, transforming spiritual lineages into vehicles of mobilisation.
What colonial expansion did, what marching armies did, was take the quiet rhythms of ordinary life and turn them into explosive forces of resistance, bound by a single principle: the defence of land and dignity.
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In Iran, the clerical institutions of Qom and Najaf followed a similar trajectory, evolving from centres of scholarship into engines of mobilisation, culminating in figures like Ayatollah Khomeini at the heart of the 1979 revolution.
This is the history that is ignored. A society shaped by repeated humiliation does not experience threats as isolated events. It absorbs them into memory.
Trump bet on dividing the Iranians and manipulating them. What he encountered instead was not fragmentation, but cohesion, a society driven to unity in the face of aggression, both military and symbolic.
Impotence of Trump's threats
Decades of pressure have produced a nation that does not yield easily to threats. Trump did not understand what it meant to target a figure like Ali Khamenei. He was not simply a head of state, but a political and spiritual authority for millions of Shia Muslims. His killing, carried out during Islam’s holiest month, was not merely a tactical act. It was experienced as an act of profound desecration.
Trump is mistaken if he believes that violence, threats, and humiliation will secure submission
Trump is mistaken if he believes that violence, threats, and humiliation will secure submission, or that the Arab rulers who yield to him, offering everything in return for nothing, reflect the will of their people. In this region, the effects of violence and degradation are not submissive. They are inverse.
He is bewildered. How can such overwhelming power, the military build-up, the spectacle of force, the relentless escalation of threats, fail to produce submission?
The answer is disarmingly simple. He does not know this region. He does not know its history. He does not know Iran.
He sees power, but he does not see memory.
Across the region, this distinction is everything. A small, besieged strip of land, bombarded, starved, and isolated, yet its people refuse to surrender.
A small country like Lebanon, facing overwhelming asymmetry in force, yet it cannot be subdued in any decisive or lasting sense. Even limited territorial advances fail to translate into real control.
The Litani River, long invoked as a strategic objective, remains out of reach, not simply in geography, but in what it represents: the inability of overwhelming force to convert itself into enduring submission.
Lived force
This is not because these societies possess some extraordinary arsenal, nor because they are irrational or driven by blind fanaticism. Such explanations are evasions. They avoid confronting the one force that power cannot measure.
The explanation lies elsewhere.
Dignity does not appear on maps, it cannot be quantified in military balances, and does not respond predictably to coercion
It lies in dignity.
Not as an abstraction, but as a lived force, one that settles deeply within societies shaped by repeated humiliation. A force that resists domination. It does not appear on maps, cannot be quantified in military balances, and does not respond predictably to coercion.
It compels people, quietly but decisively, not to yield to arrogance, to occupation, to the bully.
Even when it appears, momentarily, that a society has been subdued, that appearance is an illusion, an interval, not an outcome.
Beneath the surface, something persists. Something accumulates. Something waits.
As the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi in his famous poem To the Tyrants of the World warned the French coloniser:
"Beware, for beneath the ashes lies fire,
And he who sows thorns shall reap wounds"
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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