A List Is Not a Law

On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering

On Thursday morning Mohsen Namjoo put out a video saying that by the time anyone watched it he would either be in the air or already on the ground in Tehran. He had been gone the better part of twenty years. Being near his family and his friends, he said, now mattered more to him than whether he would ever be allowed to work again.[1]

The day before, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Abbas Salehi, told the newspaper Farhikhtegan that lists carrying the names of more than a hundred cultural, artistic and intellectual figures living abroad had been drawn up to ease their return, and passed to the bodies that handle such matters. He offered Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar as examples of the people he had in mind. He did not name the bodies. He did not give the criteria. He did not say who else was on it.[2]

Within a day both halves of Iranian political argument had reached for the same instrument. Tehran had a list. Its opponents began compiling one of their own.

Say the Right First

Every Iranian has the right to enter Iran and to leave it. It is a civil right and a right of citizenship, and it does not depend on the character of the government sitting in Tehran. Whoever boards that flight owes an explanation to no one: not to the state, and not to the state’s enemies. That is the first thing to say and it holds through everything that follows.

A Caveat With Nothing Under It

The qualification writes itself. Someone with a criminal record against them stands in a different position, and any system of movement has to reckon with that. I would have said as much without hesitating.

Then look at the record in question. In 2009 a Tehran court sentenced Namjoo to five years for insulting sanctities, over a musical setting of Quranic verses. Nobody has since said whether that sentence still stands, is spent, or was quietly resolved before he landed.[3] Five years of a man’s life, for singing. That is what a criminal record can amount to when the court issuing it answers to nobody outside itself.

So the caveat survives with its floor missing. The word record is doing work it cannot do, because the institution that produces records in Iran is the same institution whose conduct is at issue.

The Government Is Not the Judiciary

This is the distinction the whole question turns on, and almost nobody arguing about Namjoo’s flight has drawn it.

Salehi did not say whether the security and judicial agencies have agreed to let anyone on his list in and out unimpeded. He gave no assurance against arrest, against interrogation, or against a travel ban imposed at the airport on the way out. In August last year the Majlis passed parts of a bill on support for Iranians abroad, one clause of which protects returnees from penalty over the manner in which they left. It does nothing about political or security charges. The Foreign Ministry runs a portal where a traveller can check for an open case before flying, and clearance from it confers no immunity against a case opened after landing.[4]

A corridor is on offer. There is no floor under the corridor.

The Revolutionary Court can detain a person and produce no grounds, and no Iranian institution can compel it to account for that. When I wrote in July about the scaffold that went up in Alikhani Square, my quarrel was with a punishment, and with people who oppose that punishment only while a particular flag flies over it. The deeper trouble sat underneath both and I gave it a sentence in passing.[5] An arm of the state decides who is guilty, decides how long they are held, and reports to nothing. Executions make that visible in the worst way. Travel bans and airport detentions make it visible in the ordinary way, which is why they are easier to ignore.

An invitation from a ministry is worth what the ministry can enforce. On present evidence that is very little.

The Second List

Meanwhile the other registry fills up. Anyone who flies to Tehran unhindered and comes back is filed, within hours, as proof of an arrangement. The boarding pass is entered as a confession.

Nine days ago the same reflex went to work on a singer who had asked Iranians to examine themselves, and I set out then why criticising the culture of the opposition is not the same act as siding with Tehran.[6] The reflex has changed its object and kept its method. I have written elsewhere about how proximity to suffering gets converted into a ranking of who may speak, and about the apparatus that treats a well-organised chorus as though the chorus were the evidence. This is that machinery finding new work.[7]

A deputy to President Pezeshkian let the criterion slip the day before Salehi spoke. During the forty-day war he had been in contact with critics of the Islamic Republic, Soroush among them, along with Parastou Forouhar and Mostafa Tajzadeh, who was in prison at the time, and each of them had opposed the attack on the country. He called it a broad front for the defence of Iran.[8] Opposing the government, then, is survivable. Opposing the bombardment of Iran is what earns the ticket home. The sorting machine in exile applies that same test with the sign reversed, and neither camp appears to have noticed they are working from one measure.

Notice what it costs. If free travel is treason, the diaspora has conceded that permission to enter Iran belongs to the Islamic Republic, and has merely awarded itself a veto alongside. Both parties then claim the same power over the same passport. One of them at least has the honesty to admit it wants it.

The Sentence Nobody Wants Spoken

Here is why an open corridor unsettles the maximalists more than the arrests ever did.

If the atmosphere can be loosened, it can be loosened again. If it can be loosened, this state is capable of change. That sentence, plain and unglamorous, is the heaviest threat to a politics whose entire load is carried by the opposite claim: that nothing here improves, that everything worsens by necessity, and that the only exit is collapse. A returning musician does more damage to that position than a hundred essays.

The suspicion is earned, and I will not pretend otherwise. Salehi gave no names, no criteria, no agencies. An easing granted quietly can be withdrawn quietly. A state under pressure has obvious reasons to soften its edges, and the softening may last exactly as long as the pressure does.

That is the real question about guarantees, and it has a short answer. What secures an opening of this kind is not war, which hardens every security apparatus that survives it, and not goodwill, which has no address. It is peace, held long enough that the machinery of suspicion runs out of excuses.

What Would Count

Two demands, one for each side, and neither is difficult.

To the ministry: publish the criteria, name the agencies that received the lists, and state whether the judiciary and the security services are bound by any of it. If they are not bound, say so, and the invitation can be read for what it is.

To the opposition: say the sentence. No Iranian, under any government and under any flag, needs permission to enter their own country. Say it about the present state, and say it about the one you propose to build. The silence will be as instructive as it was the last time somebody asked for it.

A list is a gesture. It can be drawn up on a Wednesday and forgotten by the following spring, and nobody has to answer for its disappearance. A law is a thing somebody has to stand up and repeal in public.

Until Iran has the second, everyone travelling on the strength of the first is running a risk that is theirs alone to run. That is their business, their homeland, and their right. It is nobody’s evidence.

Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and in a written draft, and reproduced here in my own framing. An AI assistant was used to verify the reporting behind the factual claims, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model.

Keywords: civil rights, diaspora opposition, dual nationals, Iranian diaspora, Islamic Republic, judicial accountability, legal due process, Mohsen Namjoo, Revolutionary Court, right of return

[1] ‘Iranian Singer Mohsen Namjoo Returns to Tehran After 20 Years’, IranWire, 27 August 2026, https://iranwire.com/en/news/156845-iranian-singer-mohsen-namjoo-returns-to-tehran-after-20-years/.

[2] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List of 100 Overseas Intellectuals’, IranWire, 27 August 2026, https://iranwire.com/en/news/156833-culture-ministry-submits-return-list-of-100-overseas-intellectuals/. Salehi’s remarks were given in a video interview with Farhikhtegan published on 26 August 2026 and are cited here as reported by IranWire, not verified against the original interview. Please confirm before publication.

[3] ‘Mohsen Namjoo Returns to Tehran’, as above, on the 2009 sentence and its unclear present status.

[4] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List’, as above, on the portions of the Bill to Support Overseas Iranians approved by the Majlis in August 2025 and on the Foreign Ministry’s Porseman-e Taraddod portal.

[5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Who Holds the Rope’, The Twin Wisdoms, 28 July 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/who-holds-the-rope/.

[6] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Breaking the Mirror’, The Twin Wisdoms, 18 August 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/breaking-the-mirror/.

[7] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Trading in Pain’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-inside-outside-iran-and-the-emotional-market-of-politics/, and ‘The Algorithmic Militia’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/. Publication dates for these two pieces are not given here and should be supplied at proofs.

[8] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List’, as above, reporting remarks by Abdolkarim Hosseinzadeh, Vice President to Masoud Pezeshkian.