I first met Ali in 2015. He was then a member of the Student Basij (Basij-e Dāneshjooii, literally student mobilization), a student organization that was a part of the larger pro-government Sāzmān-e Basij-e Mostaza’afin, “the organization for the mobilization of the oppressed,” commonly referred to as the Basij. Drawing on a wellspring of committed young people, the Student Basij policed life in university lecture theatres and dormitories in Mashhad where I did fieldwork and across Iran, ensuring that university students were kept to standards of behavior that the “principlists” (osulgarāyān), who hold the most socially conservative position in Iran’s political system, understood as sufficiently pious. While the Basij are popularly understood to uphold the ethics of the Republican system with “meticulous clarity” (Schielke 2015, 63), my experiences with Ali suggest instead that even among the pious in Iran, a commitment to revivalist religion and the politics of principlism is marked by ambivalences and ambiguities that challenge an image of uncompromising certainty.

Since the beginning of protests following the death in September 2022 of Mahsa Zhina Amini while in the custody of the gasht-e ershād, Iran’s “morality police,” the Basij have made headlines as a “brutal militia trained to kill for Iran’s Islamic regime.” Language of this sort in media coverage on Iran has been commonplace over the past forty-three years since the Revolution of 1979 overthrew the imperial dynasty and installed an Islamic Republic in its place. All too often such discourse divides the Iranian present between an “‘odious’ backward and repressive regime on one side and, on the other, ‘kindly’ civil society representing progress and freedom” (Adelkhah 1999, 3). Coupled with a vocal diasporic activism, active on social media platforms like Twitter, the 2022 protests have perhaps more than at any other moment since 1979 raised the question of “who speaks for Iran?”

Such a question is difficult to answer in any context, let alone one as polarized as Iran. In this short contribution I cannot speak to the degree of popular support that the current protests command, nor that of Iran’s leaders. Nor do I think such an effort is necessarily helpful. Rather, I want to draw attention to the complexities of subject positions in Iran in a way that avoids simplistic binaries. That is not to say that there are no fissures or cleavages in Iranian society. There certainly are. But to situate them as radical dualisms with no overlap flattens the diversity of modern Iran and buys into a narrative—produced both by supporters of the Islamic Republic and its critics (be they leftists, royalists, etc.) that they are representative of the true, unchanging essence (zāt) of the country, and their opponents are radically otherwise.

What my interlocutors like Ali articulate are far more ambivalent subject positions, ones marked by inconsistencies, fracture, and overlap, never quite wholly reducible to any one position. It is an “ambiguous” commitment, characterized not by resolute certainty, and one that like the ebb and flow of protest in Iran, is temporally patterned. Like his compatriots in the Student Basij, Ali certainly at times expressed opinions that would be called “conservative” in the Iranian context. His stated views on women, freedom of expression, religion, and the success of the Islamic Republic aligned closely with what one heard in state media and that mirrored the discourse of principlists.

But there were always moments when ambiguities would shine through. Over the course of my fifteen months of fieldwork in Mashhad, our relationship was characterized by long discussions on politics, society, and religion, and was marked by a deep curiosity on his part about the world outside Iran. These discussions challenge the image of a fundamentalist or ideologue disinterested in engagement and committed only to their own worldview. So, too, did his ambivalent commitment to the hijab. Hyper-polemicized in Iran and the diaspora, refusal to wear the obligatory hijab has become a clarion call of the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement. Imposition of the headscarf—and the at times violent response to those who refuse the requirement—has become in turn an index of both the government’s commitment to what it understands as normative Islamic morality, and in the eyes of its opponents, its misogyny. In principlist discourse, a headscarf (roo-sari) was the bare minimum requirement. The “most perfect” form of Islamic attire was the chador, a usually black all-encompassing cloak-like garment that women in Iran have often been associated with since the Revolution of 1979. Like others who would understand themselves as supporters of the principlists, Ali insisted that wearing the chador was an effort all good Muslim women should undertake, and that as part of the Qur’anic injunction to “enjoin the good and forbid the bad” (amr be ma’aruf va nahy az monkar), he often declared that it was his duty to remind others to do so. His sister, however, never wore the chador, nor did he insist that she do so. When asked about this seeming contradiction between his stated beliefs and the behavior of his own sister, he would simply shrug.

When I left Iran in 2016 after my lengthiest stint of fieldwork, Ali was still deeply committed to the Student Basij. But his sustained ability to exist in a state of ambiguous commitment contradicts the image of an ideologue. So when I returned to Iran in 2018 for a month of follow-up interviews, I was eager to see what difference two years had made. I found that a pivotal event had amplified these ambiguities.

During my absence, Ali had taken a trip to the border with Iraq to visit the trenches and other military paraphernalia from the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). This kind of trip, funded by the state, was something of a pilgrimage for many basijis (plural of basiji, a member of the Basij), with the organization situating its political genesis in that war. During the trip, Ali witnessed a fight between two members of the organization. On the train ride from Mashhad to Ahvaz near Iraq, a young female basiji had left her bunk to make tea. Still wearing a headscarf that covered her hair, as well as a lengthy coat and pants, she had forgone her more encompassing chador, on the assumption that she was still “sufficiently” covered for the relatively short period needed. During her brief excursion, she ran into Ali and another colleague. Ali said he was shocked by the reaction of the other male basiji, who took it upon himself to berate the woman for her failure to wear the chador. In recounting the story to me, he posited “if they had been related each other [mahram], I’m sure he would have hit her.”

It is important to underscore that Ali’s encounter did not suddenly mean that he became a champion of anti-government opposition. It was not a moment of sudden or total conversion. But this interaction on the track to Ahvaz, I thought in retrospect, solidified a deeper and more thorough articulation of Ali’s ambivalent commitment to principlism within the Republic. Ali and I have maintained regular contact since 2018, and continue to discuss his changing political and social views. When we recently spoke about the Women, Life, Freedom movement, I was struck by his ambivalence both towards the state, and towards the protest movement. “Even I don’t know what to think,” he mused.

On the one hand, he pointed to issues, such as improvements in education as an example of one of the successes of the Revolution. Where once illiteracy had been commonplace, now “everyone can read and write.” Sanitation had improved as well: even the remotest village now had access to clean water.

On the other, some of those successes attributed by others to the Revolution, Ali added, had happened by a long process of cultural transfer and social development, and would have occurred regardless of the reigning political ideologies of the day. That is, they would have happened, he thought, no matter whether the Shah had remained or an Islamic Republic had been declared. The elevation of the position of women in the post-revolutionary period in terms of access to jobs and education, for example, a phenomenon much touted by supporters of the state, was instead a product of an ongoing cultural diffusion with the advent of the internet: “People have raised their awareness thanks to the internet and media. Lifestyles have changed, so ways of thinking about women have changed.”

Unlike many other young people though, he had not taken up protest against the state. Expressing discomfort with the what he saw as the lack of belief (e’teqād) of the protestors, he continues to exist in an interstitial state. I grant that Ali is a single individual, but the ambiguities and ambivalences that he has experienced and espoused are illustrative. It is difficult to draw him into any binary between support for the Iranian government on one side and protests on the other. Especially now, Ali’s positions on protest and the state—and the successes and shortcomings of both—are ambiguous. In gesturing to these ambivalent responses, I want to point to the epistemological uncertainty that the current situation entails.

Accusations of “fascism” and “terrorism” by critics of the Islamic Republic are emotive, and not necessarily wrong. I say in the strongest possible terms that I make no attempt here to offer written redemption for the Iranian state, supporters of which being clearly more than willing to use violence in the pursuit of their aims. Nor do I want to suggest that there is a “good basiji” out there, a kind and noble type, who presents a counter-trope to the usual characterization.

In drawing on my ethnographic research, and conversations with Ali, what I am attempting instead to do is to join calls to stress the complexity and the ambivalences that mark Iranian politics as a bricolage that is never one or the other. The current moment cannot be reduced to a neat division between pro-regime and anti-women on the one hand, and pro-women protestors on the other. The ambivalent commitments of those who counted—and might still count—themselves among supporters of the state, point to a far more complex reality. This capacity of those committed to the political project of revivalist religion to live with ambiguity that this piece illustrates builds on an effort to see how even the pious are both able and willing to practice forms of personal negotiation that both transcend binary divisions and their promise of a “meticulous clarity” of the ethical.