Street gatherings in Iran during the war with the U.S. and Israel initially functioned as arenas of national cohesion and collective solidarity. Following the ceasefire, however, some gatherings gradually evolved into public forums for hardline political demands, particularly opposition to negotiations with the United States.

In this new phase, participants increasingly have drawn on the repertoire of the Islamic Revolution and Shiʿite commemorative traditions, especially the rituals and narratives associated with Ashura, an annual holy period which will be marked this week. The central event in Shiʿite collective memory, Ashura – which commemorates the death in the seventh century of the Imam Hossein in Karbala at the hands of a tyrannical ruler – embodies themes of resistance against perceived injustice, sacrifice, and steadfastness in the face of external pressure, providing a powerful framework through which political grievances and demands can be expressed.

Since the 1979 revolution, the relationship between religious identity (Islam) and national identity (Iranianness) has been among the most fundamental and dynamic issues in Iran’s political and social spheres. The two identities have never been in complete opposition nor fully integrated; rather, they have been subject to numerous adjustments.

In the early years of the revolution, nationalism was rejected in favor of transnational ideals, including the export of the revolution. During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, religious and national identities were combined. Until the late 2010s, the political system sought to institutionalize this hybrid identity, promoting both ancient holidays such as Nowruz (Iranian New Year) and even figures like Cyrus the Great alongside religious commemorations such as Ashura. However, this hybrid identity remained fragile and whenever tensions arose between its two pillars (during the 2009 and 2019-2020 protests, for example), the system tended to suppress secular nationalist elements in favor of religious and revolutionary identity.

Following the nationwide 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, and the recent wars with Israel and the U.S., this relationship has changed. Young people in particular have rejected the official version of religious identity and chanted slogans such as “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, My Life for Iran,” while components of pre-Islamic national identity revived at an accelerating pace. This was observable in commemorations of Cyrus the Great’s birthday, Nowruz celebrations at historical sites, and the use of Zoroastrian symbols such as the Faravahar, a winged disc that appears on royal inscriptions and is thought to represent the divine mandate of Iran’s ancient kings as well as a reminder of an individual’s purpose in life.

Religious and National Identity in Post-War Gatherings

The US-Israeli attacks on February 28 occurred shortly after nationwide protests in January 2026, which, according to official government statistics, resulted in 3,117 deaths. During and after the protests, the U.S. and Israel vocally supported the demonstrators and President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.”

Accordingly, from the Iranian government’s perspective, the war was assessed as an existential threat aimed at regime change. The weakening of Iran’s “forward defense” of partner militias after the Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023 further exacerbated the threat perception. However, despite scenarios proposed by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, which were initially embraced by Trump, the war did not precipitate a new mass uprising. Instead, the “socialization of war” promoted national solidarity. Extensive attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and mounting civilian casualties led many who initially supported foreign intervention for the purpose of regime change to alter their stance.

For many Iranians, national security is not understood merely in military or strategic terms; rather, it is closely connected to a deeply rooted sense of historical vulnerability shaped by repeated episodes of foreign intervention, territorial encroachment, and perceived betrayal by external powers. The regime collapse strategy does not account for reconstructing the Iranian state and neglects the lack so far of a consensus alternative to the Islamic Republic.

Following the war, so-called Revolutionary Nights occurred both spontaneously and organized by the state. The most significant function of these gatherings has been for regime loyalists to control the streets in an effort to reclaim what has been seen as the last bastion of the opposition.

In Iran, “the street,” according to sociologist Asef Bayat, has functioned as a political arena beyond its physical space, where various social groups articulate demands and vie for dominance. The January 2026 protests, along with the those of January 2018, November 2019, and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement — involving diverse socio-economic strata — demonstrated that opposition groups could temporarily gain relative control of the streets. Thus, the pro-regime gatherings this spring constitute a direct effort to recapture this space.

Mohammad Reza Vaez Mahdavi, who heads a purported non-governmental organization called the People’s Support Staff for the Defense of Ramadan (2026 February War), opined that the nighttime street gatherings “were highly impactful in neutralizing conspiracies, protecting the streets, and preventing the functioning of espionage agents and destructive elements that the Israeli regime sought to create in society.”

However, the nature of these gatherings cannot be reduced solely to patriotic or religious sentiments. The external threat from the U.S. and Israel redefined the Iranian “we,” shifting priorities for some individuals from protesting domestic issues to defending territorial integrity. The government sought to bolster this with a message from the new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei commemorating Ferdowsi, the Iranian poet who played a crucial role in preserving the Persian language after the Arab invasion and advent of Islam in writing the mythical epic stories of the Shahnameh.

However, over time, particularly after the announcement of a ceasefire on April 8, 2026, and the commencement of Iran-US negotiations, these gatherings transformed into arenas for expressing opposition to the government’s foreign policy and resistance to talks as compromise and betrayal.

An article in Foreign Affairs by former foreign minister and nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif’s, which called for ending the war, negotiating, and restoring relations with the U.S., provoked a fiercely organized reaction from the hardline spectrum, including calls for legal action against Zarif. The hardline Kayhan newspaper labeled Zarif’s proposal as a form of “surrender-seeking.”

Since the ceasefire, factions such as the Paydari, or Steadfastness Front, have exploited street rallies to vie for influence within the conservative camp, attacking parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and branding negotiations as compromise, capitulation, and a betrayal of revolutionary and Ashura ideals and the blood of martyrs. This is manifest in hardline slogans such as “No compromise, no surrender, war with America,” “We fight, we die, we will not surrender,” and “Diplomacy, the humiliation of the nation,” among others. A mobile booth near Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs propagated such views by branding negotiators as appeasers.

Post-ceasefire street gatherings reference the last speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before he was killed on the first day of the war, quoting a hadith from the third Shi’ite Imam that equated negotiation and compromise with the U.S. to pledging allegiance to Yazid, the tyrant whose forces killed the Imam Hossein.

In response, Abbas Abdi, a reformist Iranian sociologist, criticized the pro-war faction for using street gatherings as a platform, stating that they “continue to seek war without accurate knowledge of the field and the country’s situation, and they are shaping public opinion for policymakers.”

“Such decisions will certainly not be successful nor in the country’s interest, but hardliners will blame the executors of macro-policies for any failure,” Abdi wrote. “Worse still, the majority of the people will not sympathize with decisions imposed by a rent-seeking minority from the street. It would be a double loss.”

A broader historical perspective suggests that the political significance of these gatherings should not be underestimated. Throughout modern Iranian history, the street has repeatedly served as a crucial arena of political mobilization, from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century to more recent episodes of mass protest and state-sponsored mobilization. At different moments, street politics has functioned both as an autonomous expression of popular sentiment and as a space shaped, organized, and instrumentalized by competing political actors. At present, ideologically driven narratives rooted in revolutionary and Ashura-based conceptions of resistance seem more visible than those grounded in secular nationalist discourse, although the relative strength of these competing narratives remains subject to change.

Much will depend on the trajectory and outcome of negotiations between Iran and the United States, as well as on the broader regional environment that emerges after the war. Whether these street gatherings remain limited symbolic expressions of political positioning or develop into a more influential force will be an important indicator of the evolving relationship between state, society, and political mobilization in contemporary Iran.