Nobody in history has done more to push Iranians away from Islam than the men who took power in 1979 promising to bring them closer to it. Not the Mongols. Not the Shah. Not Netflix. Credit where it’s due – that takes real talent.
Round one: the Arab conquest
Before the 7th century Iran was Zoroastrian. Fire temples, the Avesta, a state religion older than most countries. Then the Arab armies arrived, and it was not a theology seminar. Cities fell, fire temples became mosques, and anyone who kept the old faith paid a special tax for the privilege of being second class.
Conversion still took centuries. Social pressure, tax breaks, the occasional sword. Some Iranians refused and sailed to India instead. Their descendants, the Parsis, are still there, still lighting the fire, still remembering. Back home, Iranians never quite forgave the whole arrangement. It’s been sitting in the poetry for a thousand years.
Round two: 1979
Then a cleric flew in from Paris and announced the country would now be run by God, with himself as regional branch manager.
The minorities read the room first.
Jews: around 80,000 before the revolution, under 10,000 today, after the regime executed community leaders to set the mood.
Armenians: roughly 300,000 down to well under 100,000.
Zoroastrians: rediscovered the joys of being officially “ritually impure” and started packing again. Second exodus, same faith, 1,300 years later.
Baha’is: Iran’s largest non-Muslim minority, and not even on the list of religions the regime tolerates. Hundreds executed in the 80s, barred from university to this day, cemeteries bulldozed. Their crime is a religion that started in Iran.
And Sunnis — one in ten Iranians. The Islamic Republic has never allowed a single Sunni mosque in Tehran. A government that puts “Islamic” in its name won’t let a tenth of its own Muslims pray in the capital.
Round three: the Muslims
Then came the part nobody planned for.
Compulsory hijab. Mandatory religion classes. Friday prayers as a political rally with a sermon attached. Morality police vans outside the shopping centre. Forty-seven years of “Islam is the solution”, delivered by men in robes with foreign bank accounts. And Iranians did the maths.
In 2023 the government’s own liaison to the seminaries, Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi, admitted that 50,000 of Iran’s 75,000 mosques are closed. Two thirds. In a theocracy. The Vatican does not have this problem.
A 2020 survey by GAMAAN, 50,000 Iranians answering anonymously, found 32% identify as Shia. Twenty-two percent said none. Nine percent atheist. Eight percent Zoroastrian. Officially, remember, the country is 99% Muslim.
And this summer a confidential report leaked from inside the regime itself: 9% of Iranians support the status quo. Nine. They polled their own country and found out nobody lives there anymore.
The conversions
Before 1979 Iran had a few hundred converts to Christianity. Today estimates run from several hundred thousand to a million, meeting in house churches, converted by satellite TV and the internet. No missionaries required. Iranians looked at the official product, then went shopping.
The fire temples are back in fashion too. Farvahar necklaces on every third teenager, Cyrus Day crowds at Pasargadae until the regime banned the gathering, Chaharshanbe Suri every March with a nation jumping over bonfires while the state begs them to stop. Eight percent telling a pollster they’re Zoroastrian would have been a rounding error in 1978. Now it’s a movement.
Follow the money
Meanwhile, the people running the piety operation. Religious foundations that answer to no one, a Supreme Leader’s business empire Reuters once valued at around $95 billion, and the aghazadeh — the clerics’ kids — posting from pools in Toronto and Los Angeles while their fathers preach sacrifice in Tehran.
One ayatollah’s son with an Instagram account has converted more Iranians to atheism than any pamphlet ever printed.
Where it ended up
2022: Mahsa Amini, and a generation of women burning the headscarf the state spent forty years pinning on them.
January 2026: a massacre. Then a war. Then the rial at two million to the dollar.
People film themselves burning portraits of Khamenei. Some now treat the dawn call to prayer as a reminder of what hour the executions happen. Anti-cleric chants are so standard they barely make the news. And the new Supreme Leader, whoever is actually signing his name, presides over more empty mosques than any leader since the mosques were built.
The bit history will remember
Islam arrived in Iran by conquest and survived there for thirteen centuries. Then the men who promised to protect it got the keys to the country, and it took them one generation to turn a nation of believers into a nation of people who believe in almost anything else.
The Islamic Republic’s real legacy is the biggest wave of leaving Islam in the modern Muslim world. That is not what the regime planned. It is what it earned.
So here’s the question for Muslims everywhere else: if Islam is the solution, why is the one country that got the full dose running for the exits?
A version of this was first published on X on 25 August 2026. Read the original.