Breaking the Mirror

A Verse, and a Warning

Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake.[1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note accompanying his new song with that couplet, then did more or less what it asks. He did not accuse the Islamic Republic of anything it has not already been accused of many times over. He turned the mirror on the society that opposes it, including the part of that society now sitting in exile, and asked whether some of what it hates in Tehran has, without quite anyone noticing, moved house.[2]

What Eghbali actually wrote deserves setting out plainly, because almost nothing that followed engaged with it. His claim is that decades of repression, violence and deliberate division at the hands of the Islamic Republic have left real wounds on Iranian society, and that naming those wounds is neither an insult to the society that carries them nor a denial of the regime’s responsibility, or of the foreign powers implicated in the country’s fate. A society mature enough to stand against repression, he wrote, ought also to be able to examine itself without flinching. Then he named what to look for: enemy-making, the reflex that sorts the world into ‘with me’ and ‘against me’, the refusal to admit error, the flight from responsibility, the destruction of dissenting voices, the denial of anyone else’s success, the erosion of trust, the weakening of solidarity. These, he said, are the regime’s own tools for holding power, and ending the Islamic Republic will not finish the job if Iranians carry those same tools with them into whatever replaces it.[3]

Criticism Is Not Treason

Notice what is missing from that list: a name. Eghbali did not identify Reza Pahlavi, or any other opposition figure, or any faction. His target was a set of habits, not a person, and his method was self-examination, not accusation. One premise needs stating plainly here, because it keeps needing to be stated: to diagnose a habit is not to accuse a person of it, and to assess a society is not to defend the government that society opposes. This should be obvious. Among Iranians, inside the country and outside it, it plainly is not, and I have written before, at length, about the ranking of authority this same confusion produces among the diaspora itself. The confusion is not incidental. It is the premise the whole apparatus depends on: treat any critique of the opposition’s own culture as loyalty to the regime, and self-examination becomes indistinguishable from betrayal.

A List That Reads Like a Confession

Read Eghbali’s list again, and then read what happened to him for writing it. Enemy-making: within days he was treated as one. The binary of with-me-or-against-me: his refusal to name a side was read as proof that he had chosen the wrong one. The destruction of dissenting voices: a coordinated effort to do exactly that opened against a musician whose only offence was asking Iranians to look in a mirror he was holding up to himself as much as to anyone else. He published a diagnosis of authoritarian habits transplanted into opposition culture. The response supplied a demonstration of it.

I have described the mechanism behind that demonstration before, when a manufactured consensus got treated as though it were the evidence itself. The distinction matters more than usual here. Eghbali offered a real mirror, uncomfortable in the way real mirrors are. What came back at him was the other kind: a manufactured one, built to produce a reflection nobody had earned, in this case a lifelong dissident recast overnight as an apologist for whichever camp needed an enemy that week.

Two Handles, One Camp

For a few years, two accounts did most of the daily labour of this apparatus among supporters of monarchical restoration: one presenting itself as ‘Historical Memory’, the other, for as long as it lasted, as ‘Jokernejad’. Both were, for a long stretch, closely affiliated with Reza Pahlavi’s camp, and both worked the same trade: discrediting anyone outside it, circulating claims that would not survive a single afternoon of checking, and treating disagreement as evidence of disloyalty. For years the operators stayed anonymous, which was rather the point. An anonymous account cannot be held to the standard it holds its targets to.

That may be changing. A researcher tracing the accounts’ pattern of activity has converged on a name behind them: Mohammad Naeb Yazdi, identified as an advisor within Reza Pahlavi’s own office.[4] I state this with the caution a single social media identification deserves, not a courtroom finding, but the caution runs in both directions. If it holds, what looked for years like an organic backlash was, in significant part, staffed, which is a considerably worse thing to be than merely wrong.

Twice Asked to Recant

Eghbali has held up mirrors before and paid for it. In 1974, SAVAK arrested him over songs the Shah’s government judged subversive.[5] By his own account, interrogators working under Parviz Sabeti brought him, more than once, close enough to death to teach him who ruled the world.[6] He was in his early twenties then. He is 75 now, and the throne that once imprisoned him for a song has produced, in its exiled remnant, an operation working to discredit him for another one. Whatever else separates the Islamic Republic from the movement that wants to succeed it, the instinct to break the mirror instead of the reflection should not be the thing they share.

The Only Thing That Holds

None of this is peculiar to Iranians, and none of it is new to this decade; the reflex predates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement by a considerable margin, and will outlast whatever comes after it. What is specific to the Iranian diaspora is the scale of what rides on it: a population arguing, for forty seven years now, over who gets to speak for a country most of its loudest members no longer live in, doing that arguing inside machinery built to reward whichever voice is loudest and most uniform in a given week.

Eghbali asked for a society mature enough to stand against Tehran’s repression and still examine itself without flinching. What he got instead was proof of exactly the pattern he had named: a society, or at least a well-organised corner of it, choosing the easier option Nizami warned against eight centuries ago. The remedy has not changed since. It is critical thinking, taught early and insistently enough that a claim’s velocity stops being mistaken for its truth, and a diagnosis stops being mistaken for a declaration of war. It does not finish. Every generation has to be taught it again, for exactly as long as the mirror keeps losing to the hammer.

Notes

[1] Nizami Ganjavi, Makhzan al-Asrar (Treasury of Secrets), c. 1176, section 39. Persian text at Ganjoor, https://ganjor.net/ganjor/nezami/makhzan/sh39. Translation mine.

[2] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, post noting the reactivation of the pattern around Eghbali, X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/dariushm/status/2089720118213292214.

[3] Dariush Eghbali, post accompanying the release of Tavahhom-e Towteʼe (The Illusion of Conspiracy), X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/deghbali/status/2089053319365050829.

[4] Ali Ebrahimzadeh, X, identifying Mohammad Naeb Yazdi as an advisor to Reza Pahlavi and connecting him to the accounts named above, https://x.com/AliEbrahimzade_/status/2001380115096457372.

[5] ‘Dariush (singer)’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dariush_(singer), on his arrest and imprisonment under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for songs including ‘Jangal’, ‘Bonbast’ and ‘Booye Gandom’.

[6] Reported in Sina Toossi, X, 6 March 2024, https://x.com/SinaToossi/status/1764696307757642179, recounting Eghbali’s remarks to BBC Persian on his treatment under Parviz Sabeti, then head of SAVAK’s Third Directorate.